School of CSE - Details Needed for New Course Proposal Course Title: Robotics: How to design a person Proposer: Alan Blair, Maurice Pagnucco and Claude Sammut Rationale Why is the new course being proposed? Given the School's expertise in robotics What are the academic objectives? To give students an appreciation of the problems that need to be solved in order to get robots to perform intelligent tasks. The course will survey the current state of the art and look at the gap between the current capabilities of robots and those that appear in movies and science fiction stories. It will also look at the novel research and development that is currently taking place in this exciting field. Which programs/stage does it serve? General education Why can the same objectives not be achieved with existing courses? Currently there is no robotics course for students without a computing background. How does the proposed course relate to other courses? Not related. What overlap is there? None known. If there is any overlap, why is this justified/not a problem? Stakeholders and Consultation Who are the potential stakeholders, who was consulted about the proposal (inside the School as well as outside), what was the result of that consultation? Consultation with the artificial intelligence researchers in the School. Enrolment Impacts Likely enrolment (with justification), and impact on enrolments of other courses. ?? Justification of Prerequisites (or lack thereof) No prerequisites. General education course. Any Courses this is Replacing, and Why? None Delivery and Assessment Anything noteworthy about delivery mode, assessment (with justification). 21 Lectures Handbook Entry Robots have long captured the imagination in the movies (e.g., HAL in 2001, R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars), television and science fiction stories. They are also commonly featured in news items and are the subject of a number of competitions: from soccer playing robots in the RoboCup competition where UNSW has been world champions a number of times through to the recent DARPA Grand Challenge where autonomously controlled vehicles attempted to cross the Mojave desert and not forgetting NASA's mobile robots exploring the planet Mars. Robots are now beginning to become more and more common in our daily lives with the advent of affordable vacuum cleaning and lawn mowing robots. This course aims to investigate the gap between the futuristic robots found in movies and the current state of robotics technology. It looks at the problems that need to be solved in order to get a robot to perform intelligent tasks (such as vision, reasoning, planning and learning), how they are currently addressed and what still needs to be achieved. Textbooks/References None. Syllabus Indicative syllabus / overview of contents (at a level of detail well beyond that of the handbook entry) Topics to be covered: 1. History of intelligent (and not so intelligent) machines 2. What is "intelligence"? 3. Science fiction robots vs reality. What are robots actually capable of today and what might they do in the near future. Compare this with imaginary robots (e.g. from "Star Wars", "I, Robot" or HAL in 2001). 4. How to design a person. If we wanted to design a robot with at least some of the abilities of a human (or more realistically an insect) what do we need to do. The robot must be able perceive its environment through sensors. It must be able to change it through actuators. It must be able to build a representation of its world so that it can plan and learn. It may also have to deal with other agents to cooperate when they have common goals or circumvent if they have opposing goals. 5. Computer Vision and other senses. How can a computer make sense of a camera image, which consists of numbers representing colours and brightness. We look at feature extraction and object recognition and the problems that arise in complex environments were there is motion and occlusion and where sensors are unreliable. 6. Locomotion and manipulation. Robots affect their environment by being able to move around and by being able to manipulate objects. We study different styles of locomotion, including wheeled and legged locomotion and the problems of grasping and control of objects. 7. Localisation and navigation Mobile robots need to be able to move around in their environment. In order to do this effectively they need to be able to determine where they are and to obtain information about their environment so as not to bump into objects. 8. Representing knowledge Some theories in robotics claim that a robot does not need a representation of the world but can simply map situations to actions. Other theories require the robot to build models of its environment so that it can reason about its actions. We will look at the situation-action approach and also discuss different kinds of world models. 9. Planning. Given sensor inputs and possibly a model of the world, a robot must be able to decide what actions to perform to achieve its goals. This section deals with planning and decision making 10. Learning. Most robots today are fully pre-programmed but for maximum flexibility a robot should be able to adapt its behaviour and acquire new knowledge. In this section, we discuss different styles of learning that are suitable for robotics. 11. Intelligent architecture. Finally, we look at different attempts to put all of these components together. Throughout, we will use our own robots (the Aibos and Pioneers) and our experience in RoboCup as concrete examples of the principles discussed in lectures. We emphasise the importance of understanding the agent as a whole, that is, all the components must be integrated into a single functioning entity. Wherever possible, we relate engineering design to psychological and philosophical considerations. The lecture material would include extensive use of video and actual demonstration. Effect on School Resources: 1. Who is proposed to teach the proposed new course, and what impact would this have on their planned/current allocation? ?? 2. What sort of tutorial component is proposed, if any? No tutorials. 3. What is the likely impact on lab utilisation (this relates to assignment and project work as well as scheduled labs? Some demonstrations using School's robotics equipment in the K17 Level 3 robotics lab. 4. Any other resource needs? E.g. special print/disk quota, access to servers, access to special machines, special labs. None.