CS579 - Building and Programming Robots (Slides and Classnotes)

Week 1: (8/24/04 - 8/31/04) Here is the NQC programmer's guide. The week assignment.

Week 2-3: (8/31/04 - 9/13/04) A note on Prolog. The source code for the Prolog programs mentioned in the note:

1. p1.pl
2. p2.pl
3. p3.pl
4. p4.pl
5. p5.pl
6. p6.pl
7. p7.pl
8. p8.pl
9. p9.pl
10. Here is the listing of all the prolog programs: prolog-prgs.pl
11. Read Chapter 7 from Russel and Norvig's book.

Week 4-5: (9/13/04 - 9/27/04)

1. Goal: Complete the second project
2. Review material (Logical agents - Logics)
3. Note on propositional logic
4. Read the paper of Reiter on Situation Calculus

Week 6: (9/27/04 - 10/03/04) Topics for the week:

1. Situation calculus - Here is my note on situation calculus. Here is the prolog program car.pl
2. Planning using situation calculus
3. Planning using situation calculus in PROLOG
4. Programming: A competition for slalom run: due in one week (10/04/2004).

Week 7: (10/4/04 - 10/11/04) Topics for the week:

1. IndiGolog and Legorobot
2. Here are the codes that we discuss in the class
   1. The main program car-main.pl
   2. The situation calculus theory in IndiGolog notation car-sitcalc.pl.
   3. The complex actions car-complex.pl.
   4. The auxiliary part car-auxiliary.pl.
   5. The indigolog interpreter golog.pl.
   6. A list of queries for trying out.

Week 8: (10/4/04 - 10/18/04)

1. Slalom run competition
2. Project 4 description.

Week 9-11: (10/18/04 - 11/08/04)

1. Work on Project 4 (description).
2. The NQC code of the Legolog (U of Toronto) package: main program and header.

Week 12-15: (11/08/04 - 12/06/04)

• Work on Project 4 (description).
• Here is an example code (JAVA/Eclipse/RCX) of a simpler project. The README file is also available.
• Here are some prolog code that can be helpful:
  1. An (almost) shortest path prolog implementation
  2. Tip for using the shortest path implementation:
     • You can use the shortest path algorithm to find a path between two arbitrary nodes on the map. Now you need to turn a path into actions. You would need to look back at the situation calculus theory for the railway example car-sitcalc.pl and the complex actions car-complex.pl. You need to define the situation calculus theory and the complex actions that can help you navigate between nodes.
     • The second step is to look at the delivery program to see how it can work together with RCX, JAVA, and GOLOG. For this, yoou need to look at the delivery.pl, delivery.nqc, and main.pl. The predicates "main_control" and the procedure "control" in delivery.pl are the two main entities that you need to look at. The predicate "checkKeyboardExog" is the one that receives the keyboard string and return the actions that should be executed.
  3. An implementation that can be used to generate the path is also available. (This will be available only by request. Send me an email and you can get the source code; Unfortunately, you will be deducted some points for getting the source code).