Humanoid Robotics
Many kids join us to fulfil their childhood dream of making a robot that looks exactly the same as any science fiction movie, and therefore, to advertise we have to run a course that promises exactly the same thing. Being an IT institute, we primarily look at the software side of it, and making education affordable, focus on the simulation aspects.
The course on humanoid robotics takes you through a journey covering all software components that power modern robots. Even though the students often get lost in this journey, we make sure that the human fate is never witnessed by the robots by focused on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping concepts, through which robots always get a map and their location. The students often re-visit the rationality of their decision of choosing this elective, however, the course ensures that the robots make the best decisions always for navigation through a mixture of planning techniques and execution through controls. Because we deal with students, we know the meaning of every gesture that the students make during the class, and teach the students how to impart the same skill set into robots. To add some fun, the course also does window shopping of different robots, sensors and cool gadgets.
Syllabus
| S. No. | Topic | Details |
| 1. | Introduction to Mobile Robotics | Hardware, Software, Vision, Localization, Mapping, Planning, Control, HRI, real life examples, and related topics |
| 2. | Sensing | Different kinds of sensors used in robotics, robotics laboratory visit to see different robots and their sensors and actuators |
| 3. | Filtering | Basics, Kalman Filter, Extended Kalman Filter, Particle Filter |
| 4. | Localization | Robot Motion Models, Robot Observation Models, Correspondence |
| 5. | Mapping | Occupancy Grid Mapping, Beliefs, Fusiosn from different sensors |
| 6. | Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) | EKF-SLAM, Visual Odometry, Visual SLAM, Visual Place Recognition, Learning in SLAM |
| 7. | Cognitive robotics | Reactive approach, Subsumption Architecture, Deliberative Approach, Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive approach |
| 8. | Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction | Computer Vision Basics, Features, Feature Matching, Segmentation, Learning, Speech Recognition, Gesture Recognition, Hidden Markov Models, Fusion of different modes |
| 9. | Roadmap Approaches | Roadmaps, Visibility graphs, Deformation Retracts, Voronoi, Generalized Voronoi Diagram, Generalized Voronoi Graph |
| 10. | Control | Basics of control theory, PID control, control of mobile robots |
| 11. | Fundamentals of Biped Locomotion Control | Stability, ZMP, gait cycle |
| 12. | Full Body Humanoid Planning | Collission Detection, Configuration Space, Probabilistic Roadmap, Topology, Manifolds |
Lab Syllabus
Simulation of Robots including motion models, observation models and noise
Localization using simulated robots
SLAM using simulated robots
SLAM using RTABMAP or a similar library
Projects
Individual Projects based on available libraries
Pre-Requisites
The students go through the course on Artificial Life Simulation and therefore those topics are assumed to be known. Because not all students have done courses on Computer Vision, some elements are briefly repeated, but a knowledge of vision through taught courses or projects is extremely helpful. Similarly, knowledge of searching (Artificial Intelligence) can be very useful.
Text/Reference Material
- Main Text Book 1: S. Thrun, W. Burgard, D. Fox, R.C. Arkin (2005) Probabilistic Robotics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Main Text Book 2: R. R. Murphy (2000) Introduction to AI Robotics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Research Papers are given for the other topics not covered in either of the books.
Whats New
- Inauguration of the Centre of Intelligent Robotics from 2nd to 3rd January, 2020
- Paper presented at CICT 2019 at IIIT Allahabad. The paper is a part of the ASEAN funded project.
- 2 Papers presented at IEEE CEC Wellington are available online.
- Paper at Computational Intelligence published in an issue.
- Hosted Teun Mentzel at IIIT Allahabad for framing the incubation program NewGen IEDC
- Hosted the first advisory board meeting of the NewGen IEDC incubation project
- Delivered a talk at IEEE CIS Summer School at IIIT Allahabad
- Visited UBL Jakarta under the ASEAN project scheme. Delivered talks at multiple venues.
- Delivered talks on Artificial Intelligence at GAT Bangalore
- Participated and presented 2 papers at the IEEE CEC 2019
