Class Meeting 1: Welcome & Introduction to Robot Programming

Today's Class Meeting

Welcome to and overview of Intro Robotics
Learning about sensory-motor control & simple robots (Braitenberg Vehicles)
A brief introduction to ROS

Class Exercise: Braitenberg Vehicles

For this exercise, please get yourselves into groups of three students.

Note: In this class, you'll be doing many group exercises and working with members of the class on collaborative assignments. We encourage you to make the most of every opportunity you have to get to know one another.

Exploring the Braitenberg Simulator

Let's start working on the Braitenberg Vehicle exercise. You'll complete this exercise individually (on your own computers) and your are heavily encouraged to communicate with your group members (what's working, what's not working, asking & sharing what's working well). Feel free to share your screen with your group members if that's helpful.

So let's start exploring this Braitenberg vehicle simulator. The following example below shows how to execute the "love" Braitenberg vehicle:

If you click on the robot's light sensors (see gif below), it will display (and allow you to edit) the motors connected to that sensor (a sensor and motor are "connected" if they are either both black or both white) as well as the sensor strength.

Part 1: Examining 4 Vehicles: Fear, Aggression, Love, and Explorer

First, go through each of the basic Braitenberg vehicle options (Fear, Aggression, Love, and Exploration) in the simulator. Do they behave as you expect? Try moving the robot around the room. Also try and see how the vehicles behave with multiple light sources.

Part 2: Stopping Farther from Light Sources

Next, try to adjust the simulator parameters to have your vehicle act similarly to the "love" vehicle with one major change: stopping farther away from the light source. Are there several approaches that could accomplish this goal?

Once you have a solution that looks like it's working, try putting your robot in various locations in your environment to test many different edge cases to ensure that your vehicle is working as you expect.

Part 3: Further Behaviors

Once you've implemented a vehicle that stops farther away from light sources than the "love" vehicle, try implementing other vehicle behaviors:

Implement a vehicle that can orbit around a light source
Implement a vehicle that will turn towards a light source if it passes the light on its left side, but turn away from a light source if it passes the light on its right side
Implement a vehicle that drives back and forth over a light source
Implement a vehicle that acts like the "love" vehicle, except that it stops at a 45 degree angle from a light source it approaches

Note: You are not expected to accomplish all of these behaviors during class. We gave you more behaviors than we expect you to finish. Please use this time to have fun and explore sensory-motor control!

Acknowledgments

The original source for Braitenberg Vehicles is: Braitenberg, V. (1986). Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology. MIT press. The Braitenberg Vehicle exercise is based on the exercise presented in A Computational Introduction to Robotics course's Day 01 page.