Contents

• Completed Projects
• Course Description
• Evaluation
• Schedule

Completed Projects

• Dan Amato and Shingo Murata, Augmenting intelligent adaptive curiosity with a growing neural gas
• Jenny Barry and Heather Jones, Curiosity in time
• Scott Blaha and Alexandr Pshenichkin, Bringing up IAC
• Ethan Jucovy and Anthony Manfredi, An analysis of factors influencing the performance of the SODA algorithm
• Phil Katz and Connie Li, Using self-organizing distinctive state abstraction to navigate a maze world
• Javier Prado, Rediscovering continuous categories
• Stephen St. Vincent and Benjamin Turner, Evolving an adaptable robot

Course description

This course will focus on the special topic of developmental robotics, a newly emerging paradigm of research. The goal of this research is to create intelligent robots by allowing them to go through a developmental process, rather than being directly programmed by human engineers. By endowing a robot with an appropriate initial control architecture and adaptive mechanisms, it can learn through continual interactions with the world, developing self-organized knowledge about itself and its environment. We will be studying the following sorts of questions. What should be innate in the robot? What adaptive mechanisms are needed? What motivates the robot to act?

The course is made-up of two components: seminar discussions and laboratory work. Each class meeting, we will typically spend the first half having a discussion about the assigned readings and the second half experimenting with various adaptive mechanisms for controlling robots.

Initially we will read a survey article describing the field of developmental robotics. Then we will spend several weeks reading Tom Schultz's book Computational Developmental Psychology, which is available at the bookstore. For the remainder of the semester, we will read articles from the primary literature on various subtopics related to developmental robotics.

Evaluation

• Class Participation & Reaction Notes: 20%

  Your reactions to each week's readings will be due by 8:00am on the morning of class. You will be posting your reactions to the online courseware package Edventure. Your username on this system will be the same as the username on your College email account (not your CS account). If you have used Edventure before in another class, your password should still work. To get a new password to the system, send an email from your College account to edventure@dangermouse.brynmawr.edu with a subject of password. Once you post your reaction, you will be able to read other students' reactions for that week. You should read them before class time and be ready to respond to at least one question or comment raised by someone else. Your reactions should not be summaries of the papers, instead they should be the product the reading process (e.g., questions that were raised, points that were not clear, connections to previous material you've read, etc). You are expected to be an active participant in class discussions and should come prepared for class every week.

• Labs: 20%

  The labs will introduce you to a variety of robot control methods. We will be using a system called Pyro, which stands for Python Robotics. Pyro allows you to experiment with various robots and robot simulators while only having to learn one interface. You will write the control programs in the Python programming language. For a good introduction to Python, try How to think like a computer scientist: Learning with Python.

• Midterm Project: 20%

  There will be a mid-semester paper assigned on February 15 and due on March 3. The goal of this midterm project is to give you a preview, on a smaller scale, of what will be expected on the final project.

• Final Project: 40%

  You will be asked to design a project related to developmental robotics. During the first half of the semester you should be thinking about possible project topics. These projects may be carried out alone or as groups of two or three students. A project proposal is due in class on March 29. Each student or team will be asked to present their project to the class at the end of the semester, either on April 19 or 26. Each student or team will also turn in a research paper describing the project and the results, including a bibliography of related work. The final project paper is due on May 15 by noon.