Basic Robotic Behaviors and Odometry

Overview

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"Basic Robotic Behaviors and Odometry" provides you with an introduction to autonomous mobile robots, including forward kinematics (“odometry”), basic sensors and actuators, and simple reactive behavior. This course is centered around exercises in the realistic, physics-based simulator, “Webots”, where you will experiment in a hands-on manner with simple reactive behaviors for collision avoidance and line following, state machines, and basic forward kinematics of non-holonomic systems. An overarching objective of this course is to understand the role of the physical system on algorithm design and its role as source of uncertainty that makes robots non-deterministic. If you are interested in getting started with robotics, this course is for you! This course can be taken for academic credit as part of CU Boulder’s MS in Computer Science degrees offered on the Coursera platform. These fully accredited graduate degrees offer targeted courses, short 8-week sessions, and pay-as-you-go tuition. Admission is based on performance in three preliminary courses, not academic history. CU degrees on Coursera are ideal for recent graduates or working professionals. Learn more: MS in Computer Science: https://coursera.org/degrees/ms-computer-science-boulder

Syllabus

Getting Started

This week introduces the course and gives you an opportunity to introduce yourself. You will prepare for the rest of the course by learning about the main operation tool we will use throughout, the realistic robotics simulator "Webots". You will become familiar with Webots, its hosting website, and will begin to develop your foundation in navigating the simulator.

Sensors and Actuators

This week introduces the devices that allow robots to move and effectuate changes in their environment ("actuators"), as well as perceive their world ("sensors").

Reactive Behaviors and State Machines

In this week, you will experiment with basic reactive robotic behaviors and understand the challenges of task execution.

Coordinate Systems, Degrees of Freedom and Forward Kinematics

This week you will learn how to formally describe the global pose of a robot and how different actuators can affect this pose.

Localization with Odometry and Loop Closure

In this week, you will learn how to keep track of actuation commands and hence estimate the pose of your robot. You will use information from the environment to improve pose estimation and understand the concept of "holonomy".