CSC 290 Advanced Robotics Course Description

Content

The 'Advanced' in the course title is inaccurate. More honest is perhaps 'Selected Basic Concepts of'.

Robotics is an enormous field that includes several other enormous fields, ranging from abstract mathematics and theoretical computer science through mathematical modelling, system design, and computer programming, through specialized hardware, formal representations, and algorithms to gear and motor catalogs, soldering, and hardware-software debugging.

Robotics has enough scope to accomodate anyone's intellectual interests (probably including art, dance, history, and economics plus all the obvious ones). I hope to let substantial parts of the course content be guided by individual or collective student interest (resulting in choice of projects or lecture topics, say).

The text is Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics, by Gregory Dudek and Michael Jenkin.

I'd like the course to be more like a seminar (lots of student involvement) than a lecture course. Maybe we could have the best of both worlds with lots of lectures by students. Anyway I expect there to be homework (paper and pencil, or more often computer excercises) and a project --- wide open, including a theoretical investigation, one that uses a robot simulator (of the student's choice) or one with robot hardware (ditto). I don't see exams as being in the spirit.

Prerequisites

Generally, the more you know the more fun you'll have. The way the course looks now, it seems you'll need --

Huh?

This 'description' is preliminary and vague, so feel free to write or visit us if you have questions (or opinions). Such feed-forward can help us, so thanks in advance.
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Last Change: 7/30/09