Introducton to Mobile Robot Programming

16862/16362: Introduction to Mobile Robot Programming
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Illah R. Nourbakhsh
Brennan Sellner
Rob Siemborski

[Introduction | Contact info | Announcements ]

ANNOUNCEMENT: Illah Nourbakhsh is on leave 2004 - 2005 and is at NASA. Therefore, this course will be taught by another instructor, to be decided, in Fall 2004.

Introduction

In this course, we use 8 Nomad Scout robots running Java on our own ancient laptops to ensure that students cannot possibly have time to get anything social, or non-robotic, or athletic done for the entire semester.

Contact info

Instructor: Illah Nourbakhsh, <illah@ri.cmu.edu>, 8x2007, Newell-Simon Hall 3115. Office hours Thursday after class.
Course administrator: Jean Harpley, <jean_harpley@cs.cmu.edu>, 8x3802, Newell-Simon Hall 3111.
Teaching assistants:
- Brennan Sellner, <bsellner@andrew.cmu.edu>, x8-4860 (NSH 3108), Office Hours Monday 1.00 - 3.00 in REL and by appointment.
- Rob Siemborski, <rjs3@andrew.cmu.edu>, x8-7456 (CyH 207), Office Hours Monday night 5.30 - 7.30 in REL and by appointment.

Announcements

Unless otherwise announced, class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays in NSH 3002. Class is from 9:00 - 10:20 AM.

Essential Documents That You Need Right Away:

Java Primer, in postscript and pdf.
Java Quickref, in postscript and pdf.
Robot Manual, in postscript and pdf.
Robot Quickref, in postscript and pdf.
If you want to install the appropriate JAVA environment on your own laptop, read this instruction text written by Carl. If you want to download the Samples directories that comprise the various Java projects for this course, click here.

Handouts. NOTE there is a line below which things are from last year still. You are welcome to download and read ahead, but be forewarned that things below the wavefront WILL change this year!

Course outline, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 0, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 1, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 2, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 3, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 4, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 5, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 6, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 7, in postscript and pdf.
Lab 8, in postscript and pdf.

The Final Contest, in postscript and pdf.
Here is a document with details on low-level control and the things that may put a crimp in your robot's cycle time and latency, in postscript and pdf.

Goodies:

Each of the following is a Windows NT winzipped set, including the Symantec Visual Cafe java project and source code and a word 6.0 document describing the project in detail. Enjoy!

Instructions on playing sounds in Java!, in pdf format.

This is a project for drawing MazeWorld mazes and robots on your screen. Note that this is not the most recent version that we use in class. Get that from the laptops using the MazeGraphics sample code in the class directory!

This is a sample Depth First Iterative Deepening planner for MazeWorld.

This contains two projects, one for viewing (via Java-based serialized loading and saving) MazeWorld mazes that are saved, graphically, and another for creating, editing and saving mazes. Again, note that this is not the correct version for the mazegraphics we use in class now. Use this not if you're at CMU. If you are here at CMU, then instead get the MazeEditor code from the Samples class directory on the laptops!

[ The Robotics Institute | Carnegie Mellon University ]

Last modified September 29, 1997
Illah R. Nourbakhsh ( illah@cs.cmu.edu)