Video 1.1 - Getting Started

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#Physics #Engineering #Control_Theory #Robotics

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Table of Contents:

A) Introduction: Mobile Robots and Control Theory

"Welcome to the course, my name is Magnus Egested and I'm a professor at Georgia Tech in the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering"
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The focus of this course is,

Meaning that they don't slam into obtacles, they move smoothy and nicely without having weird oscillations in their motion.
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The trick to achieve this is something called "Control Theory". This first module of the course is going to focus on "controls" and "control theory"

"But first let me talk you about my own research....
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My research hammer is Control Theory, it deals with how do you make things move or behave well."

This could be:

Control Theory is not only for robotics. It's a general language for describing how things behave.

A.1) Types of Robotics (examples)

"Control Theory is my hammer, but my nail is Robotics. I want robots to be elegant and useful.

In my lab we do 3 types of robotics:"

A.1.1) Swarm Robotics

1) Swarm Robotics, this is how do you get lots and lots of robots to do exciting things together.

Note

Swarm Robotics is an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a system which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots.

It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs.

A.1.2) Behavior Based Robotics

2) Behavior Based Control (or Behavior-based robotics (BBR)), we will see quite a bit of this in this course.

A Behavior is basically a controller that is in charge of some task like:

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The question is, how do you design these behaviors and how do you patch them together?

Note

Behavior-based robotics (BBR) or behavioral robotics is an approach in robotics that focuses on robots that are able to exhibit complex-appearing behaviors despite little internal variable state to model its immediate environment, mostly gradually correcting its actions via sensory-motor links.
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A.1.3) Field Robotics

3) Field Robotics, this is how do you take robots and put them out in the unstructured, strange world outside of the lab.

Meaning, if you have a robot driving through a forest, all of a sudden there are no corridors, hallways or doors and life becomes more complicated.

Note

Field Robotics aims to bring technologies that allow autonomous systems to assist and/or replace humans performing tasks that are difficult, repetitive, unpleasant, or take place in hazardous environments.

A.2) Using Control Theory in Robotics

Control Theory is a key role when we want to learn how to control systems. First we will learn it in general (without robotics).

But then we are going to study the robotic applications by looking at robot models (because not all robots are the same)

Some robots are:

And different type of robots require different type of controllers.

B) Course Content

What is in the course?

We are going to look in general at Mobility, meaning, how do you make robots move?
(That is the main question we are interested in this course).

And then we will end with applications.

What is NOT in the course?

  1. The course is not about "Artificial Intelligence"", which is the high level planing . In other words, what should the robots actually be doing?*

For us, the questions:

  1. We are not going to deal much with "Perception", meaning

We are going to assume that someone else has done this, and we're going to act on the perceptual data that we already have.

  1. This course is not a "mechanical engineering course", meaning, we are not going to be building robots or dealing with different kinds of robotic designs.

Note

However, we will indeed be looking at some hardware aspects of robotics.

C.1) Course Structure

D) Install the GUI Layout Toolbox for MATLAB


Original Link: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexhange/47982-gui-layout-toolbox
Alternative Link: https://github.com/giandbt/Control-of-Mobile-Robots/tree/master/Tools

D.1) Learn More About MATLAB


https://www.mathworks.com/learn/tutorials/matlab-onramp.html

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