16-869 AUTONOMOUS MULTIROBOT SYSTEMS

INSTRUCTOR:
Tucker Balch
trb@ri.cmu.edu
268-1780

OFFICE HOURS:
Tuesday and Thursday after class

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course focuses on the key issues and current research in autonomous multirobot systems. It is a "hands-on" class requiring the students to develop and evaluate their own multirobot system (simulated or real). We will survey the inspiration and motivation for multirobot systems, the unique challenges in this field and the wide range of solutions developed thus far. This course is appropriate for graduate and advanced undergraduate students with a background in robotics or AI.

Read what previous students think of the course.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:

• Class meets Tuesday and Thursday at 1:30 to 2:50 in NSH 3002
  
• First meeting September 14th, 2000.
• Class web page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~trb/amrs/
• Syllabus and schedule
• email list (amrs@www.coral.cs.cmu.edu)
• email list archives
• Midterm
• Assignment #1
• Project 1 info
• Project 2 info
• Project 3 info
• Class Presentations info
• Final Project info
• TeamBots software.

TEXT:
There will be no text. Papers and course notes will be distributed in class. We will use the TeamBots robot simulation environment for homework and project assignments.

EVALUATION:
Grading will be based on two projects and presentations in class as follows:

Programming assignments	30%
Class presentation	20%
Mid-term Exam	10%
Final Project	30%
Final Exam	10%

TOPICS TO BE COVERED:

• Multiagent architectures.
• Communication, cooperation and coordination in mulitrobot systems.
• Diversity.
• Taxonomies of multirobot systems and tasks.
• Adversarial domains including robot soccer.
• Example biological multiagent systems.
• Multirobot learning.