Calendar

January 3 (Monday): First Day of IAP

Lecture: Overview (Finale)

• Welcome
• Staff
• Logistics
• Course Policies/Philosophy

• Contest preview

  • The Game
  • The Kit

• Today

  • Orc API and maslab.jar
  • OrcPad
  • Peg-bot
  • Soldering tutorial

Activity: PegBot, OrcPad, Orc Hello World

January 4 (Tuesday):

Lecture: Mechanical (Aaron) / Sensors & Cables (Ken)

• Activity: cable making, sensor task
• Cable Making - Have each team make their 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, 34-501, 7-9 pm

January 5 (Wednesday):

Lecture: Software Engineering (Yuran)/ Vision (Finale)

Software Engineering

• On Athena and your robot (make, ant, cvs)
• Design Principles
• Threading in Java (more mechanics than theory)
• Pitfalls

Vision

• Quick review

  • Colors (HSV, Maslab colors, this year)
  • Blue line (motivation)
  • Deteremining color (thresholds on HSV, hysteresis, region support)
  • See the tutorial!

• Feature detection

  • Methods (mention)

    • 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

January 6 (Thrusday):

Lecture: Mapping (Ed)

• 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

January 7 (Friday):

Lecture: Control (Finale)

• 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

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January 10 (M):

Lecture: Advanced Vision/Control (Robyn)

Vision

• Clustering
• Hough transform
• Stereo, optical flow
• Statistical models
• Dealing with noise
• Performace

Control

• PID
• Kalman
• Whatever you want (maybe some high-level stuff?)

Activity: Mapping activity?, purely software activity?

January 11 (T):

January 12 (W):

Lecture: Design Review

January 13 (R):

Activity: Work on Checkpoint 2

January 14 (F):

Activity: Checkpoint 2 score a point

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January 17 (M): MLK Day

January 18 (T):

January 19 (W):

January 20 (R):

Activity: Mock Contest #1

January 21 (F):

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January 24 (M): Guest Lecture

Lecture: Programming 2⁷ Robots: Distributed Algorithms for Robot Swarms & Engineering Creativity: Exercises for your Right Brain (James McLurkin), room 35-225 at noon.

January 25 (T):

Activity: Mock Contest #2

January 26 (W): Guest Lecture

Lecture: Learning in Robots (Prof. Leslie Kaelbling), room 4-270 at noon.

January 27 (R):

Activity: Impounding

January 28 (F):

Activity: Contest Day