Lectures

The material here has two parts. One is related to Powerpoint files that can easily be adopted for use anywhere. The lectures are organized into sections:

1. Welcome
2. Robotics Intro
3. SW Engineering Basics
4. MRDS Introduction
5. Use of simulation as part of prototyping
6. Use of simulation for system development
7. Process / System Models
8. Inter Process Communications
9. Data Flow Models
10. Common Control Structures
11. Hardware Integration Issues
12. Reference Architectures
13. Packaging and Deployment of Systems
14. Integration of legacy code and use of libraries
15. Systems Evaluation and Benchmarking
16. Outlook and Summary

The slides has been uploaded over the last 6 months. In addition sample code is available. It has been initially tested in a class with students to ensure a certain level of maturity before it was released to a wider audience. The example application is a small robot navigation system that uses colored blob tracking to perform localization, and planner for estimation of a path to a final destination and a controller for the robot platform. The platform is an abstraction in terms of a differential drive robot. In the sample code this has been tested with a Surveyor SRV-1 robot. Example code to interface to the Surveyor SRV-1 and retrieval of images from the on-board camera can be downloaded from the Source-Code Section.