Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory

Calendar

SES #	TOPICS
1	Lecture: Overview Welcome, Staff, Logistics, Course Policies/Philosophy, Contest Preview: The Game, The Kit Orc API and maslab.jar, OrcPad, PegBot, Soldering Tutorial Activity PegBot, OrcPad, Orc Hello World
2	Lecture, Part I: Mechanical Lecture, Part II: Sensors and Cables Activity Cable Making: Have each team make its own IR sensor cable. Sensor Task: IR proximity with OrcPad feedback. Choose “bump/no bump” or edge-finder. Have other sensors available to play with. Evening: Java® for the clueless
3	Lecture, Part I: Software Engineering On MIT Server and your robot (make, Ant, CVS), Design Principles, Threading in Java® (more mechanics than theory), Pitfalls Lecture, Part II: Vision Quick Review: Colors (HSV, Maslab colors, this year), Blue line (motivation), Determining color (thresholds on HSV, hysteresis, region support), See the tutorial! Feature Detection: Methods (Template matching, Region growing, Clustering), Maslab features (What they are, Why they’re useful) How to locate them (corner detector, symbol decoder): Possible algorithm, Describe feature detection lab Activity Feature Detection Lab, Chassis Design, Strategy
4	Lecture: Mapping Coordinate frames (image->robot->world), Image formation, ranging (image->robot, relative orientation), Odometry (robot->world, absolute orientation), Correspondence problem (we’ve solved it for you), Modeling uncertainty, Dealing with ambiguity, Possible algorithm Activity Work on Checkpoint 1
5	Lecture: Control Motors/PWM/H-bridge Simple Feedback (low-level control): Example: Korea-era smart bomb, Bang-bang control, Proportional control State Machine (high-level control): Abstract definition and examples, Used for control of robot (6.004-style maze example, Brooks-style subsumption architecture), In Java® with threading: Leverage info covered in previous lecture, Full example, make code available Activity Checkpoint 1: Search Playing Field, Find Red Ball, Indicate on BotClient
6	Lecture, Part I: Advanced Vision Clustering, Hough Transform, Stereo and Optical Flow, Statistical Models, Dealing with Noise, Performance Lecture, Part II: Advanced Control PID, Kalman, Whatever you want (maybe some high-level stuff?) Activity Mapping Activity, Purely Software Activity
7	Lecture: Design Review
8	Activity: Work on Checkpoint 2
9	Activity: Checkpoint 2: Score a Point
10	Activity: Mock Contest 1
11	Lecture: Programming 27 Robots: Distributed Algorithms for Robot Swarms and Engineering Creativity: Exercises for your Right Brain
12	Activity: Mock Contest 2
13	Lecture: Learning in Robots
14	Activity: Impounding
15	Activity: Contest Day