Cognitive Science 375

Spring 1998

Perception, Action, and Robotics

Contents

Messages:

Schedule:

Week Topic Readings Assignment
1/19 Review basic P&A concepts
1/26 Sensors, effectors, and control systems [Sahota94] and
[Jones93] Chapters 5, 7 		Weekly Assignment
2/2 Biological and robotic systems [Huber] and [Webb94] Weekly Assignment
2/9 Top-Down vs. Bottom Up Control [Brooks85] and [Russell95] Weekly Assignment
2/16 Lecture in New England Building:
Dynamical Systems		 [Duchon98] and [Warren88] and [Goldfield93] Weekly Assignment
2/23 Hybrid Top-Down/Bottom-Up Control [Simmons97] Weekly Assignment
3/2 Connectionist vs. Symbolic approaches [Meeden96] Weekly Assignment
3/9 Spring Break
3/16 Spring Break
3/23 Robot Design Robot Design Proposal
3/30 Robot Design Individual Readings Weekly Assignment
4/6 Robot Design Individual Readings Group Assignment
4/13 Robot Design
4/20 Robot Design
4/27 Robot Design
5/4 Robot Competition Day!
5/11 Finals Week

Groups

J. Crew
Members: Jinnah Hosein, Jody Webb, Jin Hee Kim.
Robot: SHE-RA
Eliminators
Members: Chris Rugger, Megan Selz, Laura Phillips.
Robot: The Spongemastah
Fire Retardants
Members: Julie Hamilton, Megan Selvitelli, Mee-Lise Robinson.
Robot: SID (Sense of Impending Doom)
Team PyroAttack
Members: Rana Nichols-Kiley, Toby Rugger, Dalidyebo Shabalala.
Robot: PyroAttack
The Muffin People
Members: Jay Johnston, Mike Benedetto, Jen Adler.
Robot: Chucky

Readings:

This is a bibliography for the course. Not every one of these will be assigned readings, but most of them are relevant and would be valuable to read. Like everything on this page, it will be evolving during the course.

Control systems:

[Bagchi97] Bagchi, S., Biswas, G., and Kawamura, K. Interactive task planning under uncertainty and goal changes. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 1997, vol. 18, pp. 157-168.
[Brooks85] Brooks, R. Intelligence without Reason. MIT AI Lab Technical Report, 1985.
[Budenske97] Budenske, John and Gini, Maria. Sensor explication: knowledge-based robotic plan execution through logical objects. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics--Part B: Cybernetics. 1997, vol 27, pp. 611-626.
[Espenschied97] Espenschied, K. S., Quinn, R. D., Beer, R. D., and Chiel, H. J. Biologically inspired distributed control and local reflexes improve rough terrain locomotion in a hexapod robot. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 1997, vol. 18, pp. 59-65.
[Mataric97] Mataric, J. and Cliff, D. Challenges in evolving controllers for phyiscal robots. (Evolutional Robots) Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 1997, vol. 19, pp. 67-84.
[Meeden96] Meeden, L. An Incremental Approach to Developing Intelligent Neural Network Controllers for Robots. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. 26(3), pp. 474-485. IEEE Press. June, 1996.
[Ram97] Ram, Ashwin, Moorman, K., and Clark, R. J. Case-based reactive navigation: a method for on-line selection and adaptation of reactive robotic control parameters. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics--Part B: Cybernetics. 1997, vol 27, pp. 376-395.
[Reignier97] Reignier, P., Hansen, V., and Crowley, J. L. Incremental supervised learning for mobile robot reactive control. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 1997, vol. 19, pp. 247-258.
[Russell95] Russell, S., and Norvig, P. Chapter 11: Planning. In Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prentice Hall. 1995.
[Simmons97] Simmons, R., Goodwin, R., Haigh, K., Koenig, S., O'Sullivan, J., and Veloso, M. Xavier: Experience with a Layered Robot Architecture. SIGART Bulletin Vol 8, No. 1. December, 1997.
[Sahota94] Sahota, M. K. (1994) Action selection for robots in dynamic environments through inter-behavior bidding. Animals to Animats 3, Cambridge: MIT Press, 138-142.

Design and construction

[Arkin95] Arkin, R. Intelligent robotic systems. IEEE Expert, 1995, v. 10, pp. 6-9.
[Balch95] Balch, T., Boone, G., Collins, T., Forbes, H., MacKenzie, D., and Santamaria, J. C. Io, Ganymede, and Callisto: a multiagent robot trash-collecting team. AI Magazine, 1995, vol. 16, pp. 39-52.
[Fujimori97] Fujimori, A., Nikiforuk, P. N., and Gupta, M. M. Adaptive navigation of mobile robots with obstacle avoidance. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 1997, vol. 13, pp. 596-603.
[Gottschalk96] Gottschalk, M. A. Intelligent motion controller mimics brain's structure. Design News, 1996, vol. 51, pp 119-121.
[Kitano97] Kitano, Hiroaki. The RoboCup HomePage.
[Jones93] Jones, J. and Flynn, A. (1993) Mobil Robots: Inspiration to Implementation Wellesly, Mass: AK Peters.
[Nwana96] Nwana, H. S. Intelligent agents: theory and practice. Knowledge Engineering Review, 1996, vol. 11, pp. 205-244.
[Webb94] Webb, B. (1994) Robotic experiments in cricket phonotaxis. Animals to Animats 3. Cambridge: MIT Press, 45-54.
[Webb97] Webb, B. A cricket robot. Scientific American, 1997, vol. 275, pp. 94-100.

Models of perception and action:

[Bertenthal96] Bertenthal, B. I. (1996) Origins and early development of perception, action, and representation. Annual Review of Psychology, vol 47, 431-459.
[Duchon98] Duchon, A., Warren, W., and Kaebling, L. Ecological Robotics, in Adaptive Behavior. In press, 1998.
[Goldfield93] Goldfield, E., Kay, B., and Warren, W. Infant Bouncing: The Assembly and Tuning of Action Systems. Child Development. 64 Pp. 1128-1142. 1993.
[Green94] Green, P. R. (1994) How to watch you step: biological evidence and an initial model. Animals to Animats 3. Cambridge: MIT Press, 55-63.
[Huber]Huber, Franz and Thorson, John. Cricket Auditory Communication. Scientific American
[Oudejans96] Oudejans, R. R. D., Michaels, C. F., Bakker, F. C., and Dolne, M. A. (1996) The relevance of action in perceiving affordances: Perception of catchableness of fly balls. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 879-891.
[Smithers94] Smithers, T. (1994) On why better robots make it harder. Animals to Animats 3. Cambridge: MIT Press, 64-72.
[Turvey96] Turvey, M. T. (1996). Dynamic touch. American Psychologist, 51, 1134-1152.
[Tyrrell93] Tyrrell, T. (1993) The use of hierarchies for action selection. Adaptive Behavior, 1, 387-420.
[Warren88] Warren, W. and Hannon, D. Direction of self-motion is perceived from optical flow. Nature 336(6195) Pp. 162-163. November, 1988.
[Wolfgang97] Wolfgang, P. (1997) Perception and action planning. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 9, 129-154.

Learning

[Slotine] Slotine, Jean-Jacques E. (1994) Stability in adaptation and learning. Animals to Animats 3, Cambridge: MIT Press, 30-34.
[Weib] Weib, G. Distributed reinforcement learning. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 1997, vol. 15, pp. 135-143.

Background:

This seminar is on Perception and Action Models in biological and mechanical systems, and our primary goal is to explore the relationships between these types of systems, and the fields that study them. Over the course of the semester, we hope to increase your appreciation of the possibilities and limits of autonomous robots, build your programming and electronic hardware skills, and provide exposure to the strengths and weaknesses of top-down vs. bottom-up design, and connectionist vs. symbolic approaches to control and learning. The culmination of these activities will be a small robot design project in which teams will build robots using these principles and skills. The robots will then compete to perform a predetermined task.

This is a seminar course, like nothing taught before at Vassar. The syllabus will therefore be evolving over the semester as we cover new territory. Roughly, the order of topics will be:

  1. Overview of Cogsci 211, programming, Robot Interface.
  2. Sensors, effectors, and control systems
  3. Biological Systems and Robots
  4. Top down vs. bottom up design
  5. Connectionist vs. symbolic approaches to control
  6. Connectionist vs. symbolic approaches to learning
  7. Multi-agent systems

You are responsible for keeping an eye on the assignments list, which will be updated as readings and projects are assigned.

Grading:

50%: Weekly Assignments
15%: Initial Robot Design Writeup
15%: Final Robot Design
20%: Final Paper