This course will introduce students all the bits of creating a complete intelligent robot. Robots need to be equipped with perception, cognition, and action capabilities. We will use the concrete Sony AIBO robots to understand in depth the issues involved in developing such capabilities in a robot. The course will have one 1.5h weekly lecture and a 1.5h weekly recitation/lab session, followed necessarily by hands-on work of the students. The course work will be intense and structured around tasks to be fully implemented in the AIBO robots. Evaluation will be based on the level of accomplishment of such tasks. We expect to be able to ask work on tasks that involve more than one robot, therefore studying issues underlying multirobot systems. All course materials, including student solutions to the tasks, will be made available on the Web. We will aim at having this course be exemplary for other universities that may use the AIBO robots.
