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The final assignment of the lot. A number of very interesting questions were posted. We tried our best in coming up with the answers and here they are assignment - questions and answers ShangAI Ex 5 Solutions Thanks and have fun :) Abishek

The next in this series of experiments involved understanding 1. Principle of cheap design 2. Emergent Behavior 3. Braitenberg Design A famous experiment performed at Zurich was study of emergent behavior using a set of robots called the swiss cleaning robots. The scenario is a number of blocks (garbage) are dispersed in a closed arena. Robots are needed to form heaps of the blocks thereby "cleaning the arena" If the aim of your robot is to clean the room, conventional design requires a vision system in the robots to identify the location of the blocks, pushing them when encountered and avoiding the other robots. But using the principle of cheap design, robots fitted with Braitenberg obstacle avoidance scheme are used to achieve this. How? The solutions are posted. ASSIGNMENT ShanghAI Exercise4 SOLUTION Exercise 4 - Study Group 160

This was a very exciting assignment. An evolutionary algorithm was used to evolve a robot dog using webots so that it is able to run for the longest time without tripping. Three scenarios were considered 1. Evolution of the brain alone 2. Evolution of the morphology alone 3. Co-Evolution of the brain and the morphology All three scenarios were studied and a number of questions regarding the benefits of each case was answered. Find the solutions to assignment 3 here. Assignment 3 ShanghAI Exercise Sheet 3 Minidog Solution Exercise 3 - Study Group 160 Thanks, Abishek

Hi, The first assignment of this lecture series was to on general intelligence. The second assignment was more interesting and was based on passive dynamic walkers Passive Dynamic Walkers are mechanical devices that can walk down a slope without any actuation. They are usually inspired by the human legs and, despite a complete lack of motors and sensors, display a very natural-looking walking motion. I am posting the solutions to this assignment here. I once again thank my team members Miss Stephanie Wartenburg, Miss Denise Reiser and Miss Xiong qu for working with me on all assignments. ShanghAI ExerciseSheetPDW SOLUTION AI Exercise 2 - Study Group 160

I wanted to learn about artificial intelligence. What is a better way than to join a lecture series conducted by an expert in this field from one of the leading universities in the world? Welcome to ShanghAI lectures. ShangAI Lectures are a series of online lectures on Natural and Artificial Intelligence. A global classroom of students from different parts of the world get together, online, to know about the cutting edge research that is going on in the field of artificial intelligence. http://shanghailectures.org/ The class is 3 hours in length through video conferencing. The classes are conducted by professor Rolf Pfiefer from the AI lab in Zurich. It starts off with the professor discussing a topic in front of the class. This is an interactive session where questions will be directed to different global classrooms on the topics being discussed. This is followed by guest lectures from eminent speakers on the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. The lectures are he...

The errors encountered when installing ROS in a MAC is documented here. ROS installation in MAC Installation of ROS in MAC http://www.ros.org/wiki/electric/Installation/OSX Error 1 When installing ROS in MAC, there comes a point where a number of tools are required to be installed. The installer automatically generates the scripts required to install the tools. It asks for your password. But the terminal sort of crashed and did not accept even if my password was correct. The solution to this is we need to manually install the tools before installing ROS. Dependencies in MAC - sudo port install py26-pil sudo port install py26-numpy sudo port install google-test sudo port install log4cxx sudo port install boost sudo port install py26-paramiko run the ROS installer command from http://www.ros.org/wiki/electric/Installation/OSX Error 2: rosinstall command not found. roslocate command not found Solution: export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.fram...

You can find my notes in installation of ROS in a mac and the tutorials that are available on their website here. ROS - meta operating system for your robot. It provides hardware abstraction, low level device control, implementation of commonly used functionality, message passing between processes and package management. Ot provides tools and libraries for obtaining, building, writing and running code across multiple computers.  Communication in ROS - several different sytles of communication 1. synchronous RPC style communication over services 2. asynchronous streaming of data over topics 3. storage of data on a peremeter server. ROS is not realtime framework though it is possible to integrate ROS file system level - 1. Packages - are used to organize software. packages contain runtime processes (nodes), ROS dependent library, datasets config files 2. Manifests - contain metadata about packages 3. stack - aggregation of packages to perform a function. ex navigatio...