The webpage with information of the course 2019-20 is still available here.

Communications

[2020-11-10]

The seminar of Prof. Howard Li will take place in the following dates:

• Tue 17 Nov 2020, 11:00 - 13:00
• Wed 18 Nov 2020, 11:00 - 13:00
• Tue 24 Nov 2020, 11:00 - 13:00
• Wed 25 Nov 2020, 11:00 - 13:00
• Tue 01 Dec 2020, 11:00 - 13:00
• Wed 02 Dec 2020, 11:00 - 13:00

The lessons will be held online, in the same Zoom room used for regular lessons.

General information

The course on Robotics will be held by Prof. Tullio Facchinetti.

I recommend to carefully read the information reported in this page.

The course will be held in mixed form, both online and in the classroom, according to the rules and guidelines circulated by the Faculty.

In particular, some “private” information, such as the link to the Zoom virtual room and to the Google Drive repository of recorded lessons, are available in the page of the course on the Kiro platform (login required). ATTENTION: the name of the course is “Robotics 2020-21 Prof. Tullio Facchinetti”; do not confuse it with the past course entitled Robotics 2019-20.

Since the lessons will be recorded live in the classroom, each recorded lesson will be available a couple of days after the lesson in the classroom.

Weekly schedule

• Tue 11-13 (Room 5)
• Wed 11-13 (Room 6)

To request for a meeting, and for any other issue, please send me an email.

Since I held/hold many different courses, I kindly ask to specify in the email the following information: name, course name, identification number, and - possibly - the year when the course was attended.

The course includes 6 lessons held by Prof. Howard Li. The lessons will be held in online form only due to the impossibility for Prof. Li to travel to Italy. The schedule of the lessons will be announced.

Organization of the exam

The exam consists of a written test regarding the topics covered during the course. The duration of the test is 2 hours. The slides linked in this page contain all the material that is necessary for preparing the exam.

Further information regarding the exam:

1. The topics of the seminars from Prof. Howard Li will be subject of open questions or exercises at the exam.
2. The slides on sensors that are available online cover some topics that will not be explained during the lessons. These topics WILL NOT BE subject of questions or exercises at the exam.

Slides

The didactic material is based on the slides shown during lessons. Additional material may be made available during the course.

ATTENTION: since slight changes to the slides are possible, it is recommended to periodically check this site for updates. The date indicated for each presentation represents the latest update of the corresponding file.

Introduction

• [18/10/2016] Introduction : historical origins of robotics; overview of a robotics system; hardware and software components of a robot;

Robot navigation

• [02/10/2019] Robot navigation : introduction; bugs algorithms: Bug 1, Bug 2, Tangent Bug; potential fields method;
• [16/10/2019] Map-based robot navigation : roadmaps; basics about graphs; visibility maps; grid-occupancy maps; wave-front algorithm; A* algorithm; probabilistic planners; Voronoi maps; cell decomposition maps;

Finite State Machines

• [13/11/2018] Finite State Machines : introduction; Mealy and Moore FSM; formal model; composition of state machines; hybrid systems; examples.

Real-time systems

• [01/10/2019] Introduction : definitions; examples; terminology, definitions and notation; taxonomy;
• [15/01/2019] Classical algorithms : First-Come First-Served (FCFS), Shortest Job First (SJF), Round-Robin (RR), Earliest Due Date (EDD), Earliest Deadline First (EDF), optimality of EDF, non-preemptive scheduling.
• [01/10/2019] Periodic tasks : task model, Rate Monotonic (RM), Earliest Deadline First (EDF), Deadline Monotonic (DM).
• [11/12/2020] Aperiodic tasks : task model, background scheduling, Polling Server (PS), Sporadic Server (SS), Total Bandwidth Server (TBS), TBS*, Constant bandwidth Server (CBS).
• [11/12/2020] Shared resources : critical sections, Priority Inheritance Protocol (PIP).

Sensors

• [05/11/2019] Measures : measurements, errors, propagation of errors, sources of errors.
• [05/11/2019] Introduction to sensors : type of sensors, characteristics of intelligent sensors.
• [08/01/2018] Sensors - part 1 : linear and angular position sensors; resistive (potentiometers and strain gauges), capacitive, inductive and optical (encoders) technologies; Gray code; gyroscopes; proximity sensors; ultrasonic sensors; touchscreen; GPS; trilateration and multilateration.
• [09/01/2019] Sensors - part 2 : pressure sensors; accelerometers; force sensors and cantilevers; load cell.
• [09/01/2019] Sensors - part 3 : flow sensors (Venturi and Pitot tubes); temperature sensors: thermocoupled resistive thermometers, thermistors; current sensors.
• [13/12/2016] Image sensors : relevance of image processing; CCD and CMOS sensors; efficient image processing algorithm.
• [14/12/2016] Time sensors : oscillators: equivalent circuit, clock, clock drift, parameters and properties, distributed synchronization; Network Time Protocol (NTP).
• [15/01/2021] Errors and compensation : types of errors; compensation techniques; polynomial functions; Look Up Table; Wheatstone bridge.

Additional references

• A very good and detailed description of the A* algorithm can be found at the Amit’s A* Pages.
• A useful algorithm to construct a grid map from the obstacle edges is the Bresenham’s algorithm.
• A great page from Professor Howard Li reporting a number of links to videos, institutions, projects, software and more about robotics.

Suggested books

The following text books are helpful to expand the topics covered in the course.

• John Brignell, Neil White, “Intelligent Sensor System”, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, 1996. ISBN 0-7503-0389-1.
• Paulo Verissimo, Luis Rodriguez, “Distributed Systems for System Architects”, Kluwer Academis Publishers, 2000. ISBN 0-7923-7266-2.
• Giorgio C. Buttazzo, “Hard Real-time Computing System” Second Edition, Springer, 2005. ISBN 0-387-23137-4.
• Howie Choset, Kevin M. Lynch, Seth Hutchinson, George Kantor, Wolfram Burgard, Lydia E. Kavraki, Sebastian Thrun, “Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations”, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2005. ISN 0-262-03327-5.
• John R. Taylor, “An Introduction to Error Analysis: The Study of Uncertainties in Physical Measurements”, University Science Books, 1997.
• Edward A. Lee and Sanjit A. Seshia, Introduction to Embedded Systems, A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach, ISBN 978-0-557-70857-4, 2011.