Building AI-Enabled Robots

Catalog description

This course offers a hands-on experiences in building AI-powered robotic quadrupeds. Students will learn the state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques in robot learning and apply them in practice to build a fully functional quadruped. Specifically, the course consists of role-playing paper discussion and hands-on labs. A set of carefully curated papers will be selected at the beginning of the quarter. Each week, everyone reads the same paper, but a small number of student presenters take on specific roles for that paper. The role defines the lens through which the student reads the paper and what they bring to the discussion. Examples of roles include the journalist who summarizes the paper and its contributions based on facts, the paper reviewer who provides critical and insightful criticisms, and the archaeologist who determines where this paper sits in the context of previous and subsequent work. The lab portion of the course focuses on hands-on robot building, programming/training, and evaluation. Students will work in groups of four to develop their quadruped for their sole project in this course. A detailed weekly plan will be proposed and reviewed at the beginning of the quarter. Through weekly labs, students will work toward their final goals of creating an intelligent companion robot dog.Prerequisites: CS123 (or other approved robotics courses), CS107, MATH51