CS81 — Adaptive Robotics
Spring 2008

Goals | Grading | Schedule | Final Projects

Class information

Room: Science Center 252
Time: Tuesday, Thursday 2:40–3:55pm
Professor: Lisa Meeden
Office: Science Center 243
Phone: 328-8565
Office hours:Wednesday 2-4pm or by appointment

Introduction

This seminar will focus on the special topic of developmental robotics, a newly emerging paradigm of research. The goal of this research is to create intelligent robots by allowing them to go through a developmental process, rather than being directly programmed to solve a particular task. By endowing a robot with an appropriate initial control architecture and adaptive mechanisms, it can learn through continual interactions with the world, developing self-organized knowledge about itself and its environment. We will be studying the following sorts of questions: What should be innate in the robot? What adaptive mechanisms are needed? What motivates the robot to act?

Goals for the course

Grading

Schedule

WEEK DAY ANNOUNCEMENTS READING
1 Jan 22   Introduction to developmental robotics Meeden and Blank
Jan 24   Developmental Robotics: A survey Lungarella, Metta, Pfeifer, and Sandini
2 Jan 29   Sensory flow segmentation using a RAVQ Linaker and Nilasson
A growing neural gas network learns topologies Fritzke
Jan 31 Drop/Add ends (Feb 01) No class
3 Feb 05   Introduction to Khepera, Aibo, and Pioneer robots
Feb 07   Learning concepts by interaction Cohen
Continuous categories for a mobile robot Rosenstein and Cohen
Identifying qualitatively different experiences: Experiments with a mobile robot Oates, Schmill, and Cohen
4 Feb 12   Developing navagation behavior through self-organizing distinctive state abstraction Provost, Kuipers, Mikkulainen
Feb 14 Midterm project Map learning with uninterpreted sensors and effectors Pierce and Kuipers
5 Feb 19   Intrinsic motivation systems for autnomous mental development Oudeyer, Kaplan, Hafner
Feb 21  
An emergent framework for self-motivation in developmental robotics Blank, Marshall and Meeden
Intrinsicaly motivated reinforcement learning: A promising framework for developmental robot learning Stout, Konidaris and Barto
6 Feb 26   Midterm project checkpoint demonstration
Feb 28   Is imitation learning the route to humanoid robots? Schaal
7 Mar 04 Midterm project due 4pm (Mar 05) Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates Meltzoff and Moore
Imitation of other minds: The 'Like Me' hypothesis Meltzoff
Mar 06   No class
 

Mar 11

Spring Break

Mar 13

8 Mar 18   Self-organizing distinctive state abstraction using options Provost, Kuipers, and Miikkulainen
Mar 20   The robot in the crib: A developmental analysis of imitation skills in infants and robots Demiris and Meltzoff
From exploration to imitation: Using learnt internal nodels to imitate others Dearden and Demiris
9 Mar 25 Final project Division blocks and open-ended evolution of development, form, and behavior Spector, Klein, and Feinstein
Mar 27 Last day to declare CR/NC or withdraw (Mar 28) A developmental model for the evolution of complete autonomous agents Dellaert and Beer
10 Apr 01   Emergence of communication in teams of embodied and situated agents Marocco and Nolfi
Apr 03   Demonstration by Doug Blank
11 Apr 08   Final project checkpoint demonstration
Apr 10   Evolution and learning Nolfi and Floreano
12 Apr 15   Competitive coevolution through evolutionary complexification Stanley and Miikkulainen
Apr 17   Hierarchical evolution of neural networks Moriarty and Miikkulainen
13 Apr 22   Presentations
1. Michael and Eric
2. David
Apr 24   Presentations
1. Megan and Chris
2. Jeff
14 Apr 29   Presentations
1. George and Kit
2. Bryce and Allison
May 01 Final project paper due 4pm (May 12) Presenations
1. Mary and Marie

Final Projects