Unit 13: Perception and Robotics

Commentary

Intelligent agents or systems must be able to reason, learn, and make decisions. These activities are at highest level of human intelligence, and are related to knowledge and problem solving. Intelligent agents or systems must also interact with the environment through perception and action, and thereby make changes to and accomplish their tasks in the physical world. This unit provides a general introduction to perception and robotics, both of which are huge topics worthy of entire books or courses. We will only have time to cover the basic concepts and principles of relevant subtopics, such as computer vision, robotic moving, and motion planning.

Unit Purpose

When you complete this unit, you will be able to

• Describe the concepts and principles of computer vision and object recognition.

Describe robotic hardware and software architectures, and basic tasks such as perception, motion, and planning.

Notes:

This unit is optional. Those who are familiar with or interested in perception and robotics can go through the unit and use them for their assignments or projects.

Section 1: Perception
Section 2: Robotics

Readings

Supplemental Unit Readings

Books:

Forsyth, D., and Ponce, J. (2003). Computer vision: A modern approach. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0130851981, 9780130851987 Murphy, R. (2000). Introduction to AI robotics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Activities

• Discuss the state-of-the-art research work and applications in computer vision and robotics in the course conference.
• Imagine a future world full of robots in daily life (just like Internet and computers of our age), and discuss the ethical and social impact of it on human beings.