The robotics primer

What is a robot?

Where do robots come from? : Control theory ; Cybernetics ; Artificial intelligence

What's in a robot? : Embodiment ; Sensing ; Action ; Brains and brawn ; Autonomy

Arms, legs, wheels, tracks, and what really drives them : Active vs. passive actuation ; Types of actuators ; Motors ; Degrees of freedom

Move it! : Stability ; Moving and gaits ; Wheels and steering ; Staying on the path vs. getting there

Grasping at straws : Endeffectors ; Teleoperation ; Why is manipulation hard?

What's going on? : Levels of processing

Switch on the light : Passive vs. active sensors ; Switches ; Light sensors ; Resistive position sensors

Sonars, lasers, and cameras : Ultrasonic or sonar sensing ; Laser sensing ; Visual sensing

Stay in control : Feedback or closed loop control ; The many faces of error ; An example of a feedback control robot ; Types of feedback control ; Feedforward or open loop control

The building blocks of control : Who needs control architectures? ; Languages for programming robots ; And the architectures are ...

What's on your head? : The many ways to make a map ; What can the robot represent? ; Costs of representing

Think hard, act later : What is planning? ; Costs of planning

Don't think, react! : Action selection ; Subsumption architecture ; Herbert, or how to sequence behaviors through the world

Think and act separately, in parallel : Dealing with changes in the world/map/task ; Planning and replanning ; Avoiding replanning ; On-line and off-line planning

Think the way you act : Distributed representation ; An example : distributed mapping

Making your robot behave : Behavior arbitration: make a choice ; Behavior fusion: sum it up

When the unexpected happens : An example: emergent wall-following ; The whole is greater than the sum of its parts ; Components of emergence ; Expect the unexpected ; Predictability of surprise ; Good vs. bad emergent behavior ; Architectures and emergence

Going places : Localization ; Search and path planning ; SLAM ; Coverage

Go, team! : Benefits of teamwork ; Challenges of teamwork ; Types of groups and teams ; Communication ; Getting a team to play together ; Architectures for multi-robot control

Things keep getting better : Reinforcement learning ; Supervised learning ; Learning by imitation/from demonstration ; Learning and forgetting

Where to next? : Space robotics ; Surgical robotics ; Self-reconfigurable robotics ; Humanoid robotics ; Social robotics and human-robot interaction ; Service, assistive and rehabilitation robotics ; Educational robotics ; Ethical implications.