Spring 2018, Fridays 1-4pm, Pierce 301

(Office Hours: Wed 5:30-7, Pierce 301)

Robots Roam the Halls: Why aren't there robots running around in the hallways of MD and Pierce, greeting visitors, giving tours, and hosting parties for the AI community? Join us, and make it happen!

Course Description:

Building autonomous robotic systems requires making Robots that Observe, Reason, and Act. How does a robot make sense of the world from raw and noisy sensor inputs? How does it control it's actions reliably and recover from failures? When does it need to reason about the world and when can it just react? How does it balance short-term problems versus long-term goals? How does it operate in a world where others (human and robots) exist? And how do we program a robot to achieve all these things? The goal of creating a robot is the goal of creating Embodied Artificial Intelligence. In this class we will study methodologies for achieving embodied AI through a hands-on and ground up approach of programming your own.

This year's theme: Robots Roam the Halls. The robot for this class is the Turtlebot: capable of moving around office environments on its roomba-like base, and sensing using a RGB+depth camera plus a whole array of other sensors. The robot is programmed using python, ROS (robot operating system), and openCV. We have six robots: Zeus, Athena, Neptune, Artemis, Hermes, and Gaia who are currently immortal but whose powers have not yet been discovered. Watch the CS189 Video from 2016.

The semester will be divided into three sections: starting with low-level control (e.g. motion, vision, feedback), then higher-level reasoning (software architectures, navigation/mapping), and then finally the final project phase (Topic TBD) . Class is 3 hours every Friday and split between lecture and robot programming labs / assignment demonstrations. The class size is restricted to 20 students and there will be a lottery process. See below for more details.

Staff:
Prof. Radhika Nagpal (rad@seas.harvard.edu, MD 235)
Julia Ebert and Florian Berlinger (julia@juliaebert.com, fberlinger@seas.harvard.edu, MD 238)

How this course works:

Friday lectures, 1-4pm (3 hours, mandatory)
Weekly psets (for first 2/3 of course, in pairs)
Final project (last 1/3, most likely in pairs or groups of 4)

Friday lecture time will be split between (a) lecture (b) demo time. During demo time each group will demonstrate their work on that week's pset (doing the demo is part of submitting a pset). Some weeks the pattern will be slightly altered but for the most part this will be the general feel. Attendance is required unless you have permission from the instructor.

Psets: All psets will be done in pairs, and there are pests due most weeks for the first 2/3 of the course. They will involve written segments, commented code, and in class demonstrations of the system working. Final Project: The last third of the course will involve a to-be-determined project.

Read the Course Policies link and the Syllabus links for more details on the class, and common questions about grading, attendance, and collaboration policies.

Prerequisites:

This year the only prereqs are CS51 or CS61. There is no prereq in AI or other robotics classes. We will assume that students have reasonable experience writing and debugging code, looking up documentation and APIs online, dealing with multiple languages and multiple software packages.

Robotics is naturally a multi-disciplinary field, so this course is appropriate for CS, ES, ME and AM concentrators, so long as you have an interest in robotics and have programming prereqs. This class is complementary to other robotics/hardware classes like ES159 or ES50/51, with a focus on autonomous mobile robots.

How the lottery and restricted enrollment will work:

The class has a limited enrollment of 20 students because of the hardware. If the class is oversubscribed, we will aim to maintain a diversity of students across concentrations and years. We will try to accommodate as many folks as we can. There will be a google form on the website available the first day of classes for signing up. Because the study card signing is also on friday, this adds a bit to the process: We will approve classes Friday evening and Saturday morning for those who make the lottery, and you can add the course with no penalty on Monday. If you are already certain without shopping the class, please email Radhika; we may approve part of the lottery slots before Friday if you are certain.