CS393R: Autonomous Robots -- Resources

CS393R: Autonomous Robots -- Resources


Tekkotsu

  • Tekkotsu Website
  • Tekkotsu Documentation
  • Tekkotsu Tutorial (local copy of this tutorial can be opened by starting at index.html in /home/katie/Public/TekkotsuTutorial/)
  • Tekkotsu Troubleshooting and Debugging
  • Color segmentation
  • Quick guide on getting started and compiling a memory stick: Getting started
  • Partial notes on differences between Tekkotsu 4.0 and Tekkotsu 5.1: Differences
  • Naos and UT Austin Villa

  • Austin Villa
  • Aldebaran Robotics
  • Information about Setting Up and Using the UT Austin Villa Codebase

  • Week 0 (8/25): Class Overview

  • Slides from 8/27: (ppt).

  • Week 1: Introduction to motion control

  • Slides from 8/30 on control: (pdf, ppt).
  • Slides from 9/1 on Katie's intro to the lab: (pdf).
  • A page with some control applets to play with.
  • PID control on a quadrotor

  • Week 2: Motion control continued

  • Slides on the joint modeling paper from 9/6: (pdf).
  • I showed some slides (pdf) from lecture 2 of the 2008 class at CMU.
  • A Braitenberg simulator.
  • One that runs as a java applet
  • The whole Braitenberg book
  • A paper that was based on a class project in the 2005 class that extended the joint modeling paper:
    A Neural Network-Based Approach to Robot Motion Control.
    Uli Grasemann, Daniel Stronger, and Peter Stone.
    In Ubbo Visser, Fernando Ribeiro, Takeshi Ohashi, and Frank Dellaert, editors, RoboCup-2007: Robot Soccer World Cup XI, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 480

  • Week 3: Probability/Sensing

  • Slides from chapter 2 of the book: (ppt).
  • The other slides I showed on probability and Bayes' Rule (just the first 7 slides)
  • Some slides on sensors: (pdf). The ones I showed from CMU: (pdf).
  • A Bayes' Theorem calculator and example.
  • Another.
  • Andrew Moore's tutorial on probability density functions, including variance/covariance.

  • Week 4: Kalman Filters

  • Slides from 9/20 on Kalman filters: (ppt, pdf).
  • Slides from the book: (ppt, pdf).
  • More details from Welch and Bishop
  • A youtube tutorial endorsed by a student in the class.
  • A RoboCup application of Kalman filters (see Section 2.3).
  • A paper about the unscented Kalman Filter(UKF) and how it improves upon the EKF for estimation of non-linear systems (html version).
  • A description of the use of a Kalman Filter for ball tracking in RoboCup: Han and Veloso, 1997.
  • Newcastle RoboCup Team Report describing the Kalman Filter for localization and ball tracking. (See section 4). Quinlan et al, 2005.
  • CWMtx C++ Matrix library.
  • wikipedia has a good 2D example.

  • Week 5: Localization

    Additional readings:


    Week 6: Vision


    Week 7: Walking

  • Slides on ZMP: (pdf)
  • Slides on the learned Aibo walk: (pdf)
  • Slides on the stable version: (pdf)
  • Slides on the skill optimization paper: (pdf)
  • Slides on bipedal robot control: (ppt)
  • Zero-Moment Point - Thirty Five Years of Its Life
    Vukobratovic, M. and Borovac, B.
    International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, Vol.1, No. 1, pp.157-173, 2004.
  • Biped Walking Pattern Generation by using Preview Control of Zero-Moment Point
    Kajita, S., Kanehiro, F., Kaneko, K., Fujiwara, K., Harada, K., Yokoi, K. and Hirukawa, H.
    ICRA 2003.
  • The Nao Devil's walking paper that uses ZMP and preview control
  • Machine Learning for Fast Quadrupedal Locomotion
    Nate Kohl and Peter Stone
    In The Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 611-616, July 2004.
  • A paper on also optimizing for stability.
  • A paper on optimizing ball capturing.
  • A reference on Nelder-Mead (aka Amoeba). Another one.
  • A reference on Powell's method
  • Videos from the skill optimization paper
  • Videos from the follow-up paper
  • Big dog in action. A paper about it.
  • A 2-legged follow-up to big dog
  • ASIMO videos (check out the running one). Here's one where it walks up and down stairs. Here's some additional information on the walk.
  • New Asimo!
  • A Nao climbing stairs
  • QRIO running.
  • Kuka balancing robot
  • RoboCup 2009 humanoid league videos.
  • RoboCup 2010 humanoid league videos.
  • Russ Tedrake's videos.
  • Chris Atkeson's course on Legged Locomotion
  • Jan Peters' course on locomotion
  • The development of Honda humanoid robot
    Hirai, K. and Hirose, M. and Haikawa, Y. and Takenaka, T.
    ICRA 1998.
  • Legged robots that balance.
    Raibert, M. H.
  • Virtual Model Control of a Bipedal Walking Robot
    Pratt, J., Dilworth, P. and Pratt, G.
    ICRA 1997.
  • Hybrid Zero Dynamics of Planar Biped Walkers
    Westervelt, E.R., Grizzle, J.W. and Koditschek, D.E.
    IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, Vol.48, No.1, pp.42-56, 2003.
  • Modeling and Control of Multi-Contact Centers of Pressure and Internal Forces in Humanoid Robots
    Luis Sentis, Jaeheung Park, and Oussama Khatib.
    IROS 2009.

  • Week 8: Action and sensor models

  • Slides on ASAMI: (pdf)
  • I showed some slides (pdf) from lecture 2 of the 2008 class at CMU.
  • Additional readings:

    Week 9: Path Planning

  • Slides from the intro lecture of Howie Choset's motion planning course. See also his slides on A*, D* lite, and sampling based methods.
  • Urban challenge path planning paper:
    Practical Search Techniques in Path Planning for Autonomous Driving
  • Video of a holonomic robot
  • A* visualization
  • RRT page
  • An extension of RRT that interleaves execution
    Real-Time Randomized Path Planning for Robot Navigation
    James Bruce, Manuela Veloso
  • A paper on RRT with dynamic obstacles: Multipartite RRTs for Rapid Replanning in Dynamic Environments. Zucker et al.
  • A page on Voronoi planning
  • Sensor-Based Exploration: The Hierarchical Generalized Voronoi Graph
    Choset and Burdick
  • Voronoi page with applet
  • Three papers on the potential field approach: Borenstein, 1991; Konolige, 2000;
    Numerical Potential Field Techniques for Robot Path Planning: Barraquand, Langlois, Latombe
  • Craig Reynolds' boids (especially click on "steering")
  • Andrew Ng's A* search notes
  • Slides from Johns Hopkins on bug algorithms
  • Sven Koenig's site on LPA* and D* lite

  • Week 10: Behavior Architectures

  • The planning slides (postscript).
  • A journal article with more details on the initial subsumption implementation:
    Brooks, R. A. "A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot", IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation, Vol. 2, No. 1, March 1986, pp. 1423; also MIT AI Memo 864, September 1985. The detail slides from that article.
  • A radio interview with Rodney Brooks.
  • A journal article extending subsumption to multi-robot systems:
    Designing and Understanding Adaptive Group Behavior. (citeseer link)
    Maja J Mataric.
    Adaptive Behavior 4:1, Dec 1995, 51-80.
  • Intelligence without Robots (A Reply to Brooks) by Oren Etzioni. AI Magazine, 14(4), December 1993.
  • Pengo
  • Structured Control for Autonomous Robots.
    Reid Simmons.
    IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 10:1, pp. 34-43, February 1994.
  • A paper on an architecture for action selection using value functions that was applied in simulated soccer. The accompanying slides.

  • Week 11: Multi-Robot Coordination

  • Slides on continual area sweeping (pdf)
  • Videos of continual area sweeping.
  • Robot surveillance, Ahmadi and Stone, 2005.
  • Distributed Intelligence: Overview of the Field and its Application in Multi-Robot Systems.
    Lynne E. Parker.
    Journal of Physical Agents, March 2008.
  • Theoretical Analysis of the Multi-agent Patrolling Problem.
    Yann Chevaleyre.
    IAT '04.
  • A fault-tolerant modular control approach to multi-robot perimeter patrol.
    Alessandro Marino, Lynne E. Parker, Gianluca Antonelli, Fabrizio Caccavale and Stefano Chiaverini.
    ROBIO '09.
  • Flexible Teamwork in Behavior-Based Robots.
    Gal A. Kaminka and Inna Frenkel.
    In Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05) , 2005.
  • Follow-up and other interesting papers from Gal Kaminka's lab
  • Swarmanoid, winner of the 2011 AAAI video competition.
  • James McLurkin's work on multi-robot systems.
  • Kiva systems demo
  • Interview with Mick Mountz, Kiva CEO.
  • An interesting research project on a robot garden from Colorado.
  • A course on multi-robot systems from Colorado, complete with detailed slides.
  • Trail-Laying Robots for Robust Terrain Coverage.
    J. Svennebring and S. Koenig.
    In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2003.
  • Sven Koenig's Ant Robotics page, including a video from the paper.
  • The Generation of Bidding Rules for Auction-Based Robot Coordination.
    C. Tovey, M. Lagoudakis, S. Jain and S. Koenig.
    In Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata, L. Parker, F. Schneider and A. Schultz (editor), 3-14. Springer, 2005.
  • Task Decomposition, Dynamic Role Assignment, and Low-Bandwidth Communication for Real-Time Strategic Teamwork.
    Stone and Veloso.
    AIJ, 1999.
    See sections 1-4, 6.1 and 7.1.
  • Slides on PTS domains, locker-room agreements (ps)
  • Slides on MAS in pursuit domains (ps)
  • A self-balancing table from Radhika Nagpal's lab.
  • self-configuring robots from USC.

  • Week 12: Applications

  • Kurt Dresner's slides on AIM.
  • JoFR 2008 Special Issue on the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, Part I
  • JoFR 2008 Special Issue on the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, Part II
  • JoFR 2008 Special Issue on the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, Part III
  • Festo flying/swimming robots
  • A very fast robot hand
  • Applications papers and related resources from a previous version of this course
  • Autonomous helicopter control, Ng et al., 2004.
  • PEGASUS: A policy search method for large MDPs and POMDPs, Andrew Y. Ng and Michael Jordan. In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Conference, 2000.
  • Andrew Ng's robot videos.
  • Robot air hockey, Bentivegna and Atkeson, 2002.
  • Bentivegna's page with videos.

  • Week 13: Social Implications

  • Illah Nourbakhsh's course on ethics and robotics
  • Ron Arkin's tech report on embedding ethics in robots.
  • Some writings on the singularity: a resesarch institute, and Ray Kurzweil's page.
  • Jordan Pollack's GOLEM project: evolving physical robots.
  • Daniel Wilson's Robot Uprising book.
  • The Lifeboat Foundation is dedicated to assessing and protecting against threats to humanity.

  • Week 14: Project Demos


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