CSCI 584
Control and Learning in Mobile Robots
and Multi-Robot Systems
Course Basics
Course Description
Syllabus
Project
Grading
Related Web Sites
Related Readings
Taught: Spring 2000, Fall 2001, Fall 2003, Fall 2005, Fall 2008
Not taught: Fall 2006, Spring 2007, Fall 2007

If you are enrolled in this class, please check this page regularly for updated information.

Course Basics
Instructor: Prof. Maja J Matarić
Office:RTH 407
Phone:(213) 740-4520
Email:mataric (at) usc.edu
WWW:http://robotics.usc.edu/~maja
Office Hours:By appointment; send email or talk w/ prof. after class
Time and place:
Thursdays noon-2:50pm, RTH 406

Students requesting academic accomodations based on a disability are required to register with Disability Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved accomodations can be obtained from DSP when adequate documentaion is filed. Please be sure the letter is delivered to the Professor (or TA) as early in the semester as possible. DSP is open Monday-Friday, 8:30-5:00. The office is in Student Union 301 and their phone number is (213) 740-0776.

Graduate credit:
This course counts toward the Intelligent Systems (formerly AI) track credit for PhD students in the IS track. It also counts toward MS credit for MS students enrolled in the Intelligent Robotics MS program (MSCS-IR) .

Prerequisites:
Undergraduate AI (e.g., CSCI 460) or graduate AI (CS 561) or Introduction to Robotics (CSCI 445) or Sensing and Planning in Robotics (CSCI 547) or permission of instructor.

Course Description
Short catalog description:

Survey of robot control and learning methods from technical papers. Control architectures, adaptation, learning, cooperation, distributed v. centralized approaches, cooperative and competitive systems. Prerequisite: CSCI 460 or 445 or 561 or 547.

Detailed description:

This course is a seminar-style hands-on survey of issues in approaches to control and learning in single and multi-robot systems. Besides teaching about robotics, it is a specific goal of this course to advance the participating students' critical thinking and communication skills, through active discussions and regular presentations and report writing.

We will read original seminal papers that track the development of the field and overview the different state-of-the-art approaches to mobile robot control, including reactive, hybrid, and behavior-based based systems. The discussion will focus on the issues of resolving the fundamental conflict between thinking and acting, i.e., high-level deliberation and real-time control. Different approaches and robot control architectures for addressing this issue will be covered and discussed. In the second part of the course we will discuss scaling up robot control to multi-robot systems to human-robot interaction and robot teams. We will also address adaptation and learning in single and multi-robot systems, and deal with the many challenges those problems present. Several other relevant topics will be covered at least briefly, including biological inspirations for robot control and philosophical foundations. All topics will be illustrated with implemented systems and demonstrated with videos.

Each week, all students will read all of the assigned readings. Each of the assigned readings will be presented by a pair of students, and discussed and critiqued by all others. The students presenting a paper in a given class should prepare a clear 25-minute presentation. This presentation should assume that the audience has read the paper, and not spend more than about 5 minutes summarizing it. Most of the presentation should be spent on discussing the paper, its strengths, weaknesses, any points needing clarification, and addressing any questions. You should be encouraged to include videos and any other interesting supporting information in your presentations.

For information on how to present a paper, look here. You are expected to prepare a PowerPoint/Foils presentation to show from your laptop. An LCD projector is available in the meeting classroom for the paper presentations; it is your responsibility to provide the presentation on a laptop that is compatible with the projector, and cables to connect to it. For any logistical questions, please contact the course instructor or TA ahead of time.

For each paper being covered on a given day, each student (whether presenting or not), will bring to class a report up to one page long (no more), consisting of the following parts:

  1. a paragraph briefly summarizing the contributions of the paper (copies of the abstract and/or intro and/or conclusions will not do);
  2. a paragraph critiquing the paper. The critique should take the form of addressing the strengths and weaknesses of the paper, comparing it briefly to other work, especially other papers read in class, as relevant, etc.
The reports should be written in the same formal tone as the papers read in class; this means on contractions, jokes, or otherwise inappropriate expressions for a technical report. Eloquent prose and literary style are encouraged, as is originality of content, but keep in mind that these reports are one type of practice for technical writing.

All summary reports should include: the student's name, and the title and authors of the paper being summarized and critiqued. Hand-written or late reports will not be accepted. Each paper report should be turned in on a separate piece of paper, i.e., do not bundle multiple reports due on a given day into a single report, turn them in as separate stand-alone reports.

An exemplary report written by one of your peers is available here. In summary, for each class, you should bring:

  1. printouts or digital versions of the papers being discussed,
  2. a printed summary report for each of the papers,
  3. a presentation, if you are presenting one of the papers,
  4. great enthusiasm for discussing all of the papers. :)

Syllabus
 The course syllabus is adaptable based on the input from the students about topic and paper preferences.

Note: please bring the readings to class on the assigned day, in digital or hardcopy format, so you can refer to specific sections, pages, and images.

The Robotics Primer by M. Matarić, MIT Press 2007 (heretofore referred to as RP) is the background textbook for this course. The material in this textbook is assumed background for the course. You can read the textbook at the start of the semester or throughout (as indicated by the syllabus); if you have prior robotics background much of this material should be familiar to you already. In any case, you are expected to have read the textbook.

The course readings consist of published papers from the field, listed and downloadble below (any issues with downloading the papers should be reported to the TA). Papers marked with Roman numerals will be presented; you will be expected to also read (or view, if videos) the background material (marked with ) which supports the papers. For additional optional papers and resources, please refer to the list found here. Three optional background textbooks are on reserve at the library for your convenience:

Additional Reports
If you'll only be presenting three papers, then you need to write two additional reports (like the weekly hand-ins) on two papers of your choice that are not included in the syllabus list. The papers can come from the Relevant Readings section or may be otherwise uncovered chapters from any of the three textbooks above. Any other papers should be approved by the TA.

Aug 28 : Introduction to the course
RP: chapters 1-9
Sep 4: Principles of Control Architectures
RP: chapters 10-12
  1. "Intelligence Without Reason", Rodney A. Brooks, Proceedings of 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91), Sydney, Australia, pages 569-595, August 1991.
    Presenter: Prof. Matarić
  2. "Modeling Adaptive Autonomous Agents", Pattie Maes, Artificial Life, 1(1-2), MIT Press, pages 135-162, 1994.
    Presenter: Pro: Harshvarbhan Vathsangan
  3. "What are Plans For", Philip Agre and David Chapman, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 6, Elsevier Science, pages 17-34, 1990.
    Presenter: Jeremy Leibs
Sep 11 : Reactive Control
RP: chapter 14
  1. "A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot", Rodney A. Brooks, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 2(1), pages 14-23, April 1986.
    Presenter: Ross Mead
  2. "A Robot that Walks; Emergent Behavior from a Carefully Evolved Network", Rodney A. Brooks, Neural Computation, 1(2), MIT Press, pages 253-262, 1989.
    Presenter: Darren Earl
  3. "Universal Plans for Reactive Robots in Unpredictable Environments", Marcel Schoppers, Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-87), Milan, Italy, pages 1039-1046, August 1987.
    Presenter: Aaron Stclair
Here is an inflammatory debate about the paper above:
Sep 18 : Hybrid Control
RP: chapters 13 and 15
  1. "SSS: A Hybrid Architecture Applied to Robot Navigation", Jon Connell, Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-92), Nice, France, pages 2719-2724, May 12-14, 1992.
    Presenter: Juan Fasola
  2. "On Three-Layer Architectures", Eran Gat, Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Robotics, in D. Kortenkamp, R. P. Bonnasso and R. Murphy (eds.), AAAI Press, pages 195-210, 1998.
    Presenter: Michael Aherne

    Background reading about Player/Stage: "Most Valuable Player: A Robot Device Server for Distributed Control" Brian P. Gerkey, Richard T. Vaughan, Kasper Stoy, Andrew Howard, Gaurav S Sukhatme, and Maja J Matarić. In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2001), pages 1226-1231, Wailea, Hawaii, October 29 - November 3, 2001.

    Background reading about Gazebo: "Design and Use Paradigms for Gazebo, An Open-Source Multi-Robot Simulator", Nathan Koenig and Andrew Howard. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 2149-2154, Sendai, Japan, Sep 2004.

  3. Tutorial on Player/Stage/Gazebo. Slides are available here.
    Presenter: David Feil-Seifer
Sep 25 : Behavior-Based Control
RP: chapters 16 and 17
Here is a brief background article on control architectures and representation in behavior-based robotics:
"Situated Robotics", Maja J Matarić, invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Reference Limited, Nov 2002.
  1. "Integration of Representation Into Goal-Driven Behavior-Based Robots", Maja J Matarić, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 8(3), pages 304-312, June 1992.
    Presenters: Pierre Johnson
  2. "AuRA: Principles and Practice in Review", Ron Arkin and Tucker Balch, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 9(2-3), pages 175-189, April 1997.
    Presenters: Khawaja Shams
  3. "Multiple objective behavior-based control", Paolo Pirjanian, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 31:1-2, 30 April 2000, pages 53-60.
    Presenters: Ross Mead
Oct 2 : Navigation
RP: chapter 19
Project proposals due in class.
  1. "Monte Carlo Localization: Efficient Position Estimation for Mobile Robots", D. Fox, W. Burgard, F. Dellaert, and S. Thrun, Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'99), pages 208-216, July 1999.
    Presenters: Michael Aherne
  2. "Estimating Uncertain Spatial Relationships in Robotics", Peter Cheeseman, Randall C. Smith, Matthew Self, n Autonomous Robot Vehicles, I. J. Cox and G. T. Wilfong, editors, pp. 167-193, Springer-Verlag, 1990.
    Presenters: Aaron St.Clair
  3. "The Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation", Julio Rosenblatt, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 9(2-3), pages 339-360, April 1997.
    Presenters: Jeremy Leibs
Oct 9: Human-Robot Interaction
  1. "A Survey of Socially Interactive Robots", T. Fong, Illah Nourbakhsh and Kerstin Dautenhahn, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42(3-4), pages 143-166, 2003.
    Presenter: Pierre Johnson
  2. "MINERVA: A second generation mobile tour-guide robot", Sebatian Thrun, Maren Bennewitz, Wolfram Burgard, Armin B. Cremers, Frank Dellaert, Dieter Fox, Dirk Haehnel, Charles Rosenberg, Nicholas Roy, Jamieson Schulte, and Dirk Schulz, Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 10-15 May 1999.
    Presenter: Juan Fasola
  3. "Roball, the rolling robot", Francois Michaud and Serge Caron, Autonomous Robots, 12(2), pages 211-222, 2002.
    Presenter: Darren Earl
Oct 16: Human-Robot Interaction & Assistive Robotics
  1. "Towards robotic assistants in nursing homes: challenges and results", Joelle Pineau, Micheal Montemerlo, Martha Pollack, Nicholas Roy and Sebastian Thrun. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 42, Issues 3-4, 31 March 2003, pages 271-281.
    Presenter: Jeremy Leibs
  2. "User-Robot Personality Matching and Assistive Robot Behavior Adaptation for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Therapy", Adriana Tapus, Cristian Tapus, and Maja J. Matarić, Intelligent Service Robotics Journal, Special Issue on Multidisciplinary Collaboration for Socially Assistive Robotics, A. Tapus, ed., 2008.
    Presenter: Khawaja Shams
  3. "A motivation system for regulating human-robot interaction", Cynthia Breazeal, Proceedings of the fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 98). Madison, WI, 1998, pages 54-61.
    Presenter: Khawaja Shams
Oct 23: Assistive Robotics
  1. "Wheelesley, A Robotic Wheelchair System: Indoor Navigation and User Interface.", Holly A. Yanco, In Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Assistive Technology and Artificial Intelligence,, edited by V.O. Mittal, H.A. Yanco, J. Aronis, and R. Simspon. Springer-Verlag, 1998, pp. 256-268.
    Presenter: Pierre Johnson
  2. "Mixed-Initiative Control of Multiple Heterogeneous Robots for Urban Search and Rescue" Robin R. Murphy, Jennifer Casper, Mark Micire, Jeff Hyams. Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue Technical Report CRASAR-TR2000-11, 2000.
    Presenter: Ross Mead
  3. "Robots at Home: Understanding Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction", Cory Kidd and Cynthia Breazeal, IROS-082008; note: this will likely be replaced by the journal version by 10/15
    Presenters: Khawaja Shams
Oct 30 : Supervised and Unspurvised Robot Learning
RP: chapter 21

  1. Background reading: "Getting Reinforcement Learning to Work on Real Robots", William D. Smart and Leslie Pack Kaelbling, "Proceedings of the Conference on Automated Learning and Discovery (CONALD 98)", 1998.
  2. "Learning to Coordinate Behaviors", Pattie Maes and Rodney A. Brooks, Proceedings, 8th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), AAAI Press/MIT Press, pages 796-802, 1990.
    Presenter: Darren Earl
  3. "Automatic Programming of Behavior-Based Robots Using Reinforcement Learning", Sridhar Mahadevan and Jon Connell, Artificial Intelligence , 55(2-3), 311-365, 1991.
    Presenter: Michael Aherne
  4. Background reading on ALVINN
    Knowledge-based Training of Artificial Neural Networks for Autonomous Robot Driving", Dean Pomerleau, Robot Learning, Kluwer Academic Publishing, pages 19-43, 1993.
    Presenter: Aaron St. Clair
Nov 6 : Humanoids in HRI
  1. "Human-Oriented Interaction With an Anthropomorphic Robot" by T. Spexard, M. Hanheide, and G. Sagerer, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 23, No. 5, Oct 2007.
    Presenter: Juan Fasola
  2. "Enabling Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction for the Karlshue Humanoid Robot" by R. Stiefelhagen, H. Ekenel, C. Fugen, P. Gieselmann, H. Holzapfel, F. Kraft, K. Nickel, M. Voiet and A. Waibel, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 23, No. 5, Oct 2007.
    Presenter: Ross Mead
  3. "Android as a telecommunication medium with a human-like presence", by D. Sakamoto, T. Kanda, T. Ono, H. Ishiguro and N. Hagita, Proceedings, ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), ACM SIGCHI/SIGART, 2007, 193-200.
    Presenter: Pierre Johnson
Nov 13 : Multi-Robot Coordination
RP: chapter 18 and 20
A video of the soccer playing process from the perspective of a Sony dog robot.
  1. A (partial but extensive) annotated bibliography of work on stigmergy.
    "Stigmergy, self-organization, and sorting in collective robotics", Owen Holland and Chris Melhuish, Artificial Life, 5(2), pages 173-202, 1999.
    Presenter: Ross Mead
  2. "A formal framework for the study of task allocation in multi-robot systems", by B. Gerkey and M. Matarić, International Journal of Robotics Research, 23(9):939-954, September 2004.
    Presenter: Jeremy Leibs
  3. "Task decomposition, dynamic role assignment, and low-bandwidth communication for real-time strategic teamwork", Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso, Artificial Intelligence, 110(2), pages 241-273, 1998.
    Presenter: Darren Earl
Nov 20 : Activity Tracking and Modeling
    A resource site on biological motion perception.
  1. Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis by G. Johansson (1973), Perception and Psychophysics 14, 201-211
    Presenter: Michael Aherne
  2. "Who is IT? Inferring Role and Intent from Agent Motion", by C. Crick, M. Doniec, B. Scassellati, Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2007), London, England, July 2007.
    Presenter: Khawaja Shams
  3. "Adapting navigation strategies using motion patterns of people", by M. Bennewitz, W. Burgard and S. Thurn, Proceeding, ICRA 03
    Presenter: Aaron St.Clair
Dec 4 : Grand Challenges
  1. "Stanley: The Robot that Won the DARPA Grand Challenge", by S. Thrun et al., Journal of Field Robotics, 23(9), 669-692.
    Presenter: Juan Fasola
  2. "Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments: Boss and the Urban Challenge" by Urmson et al., Journal of Field Robotics, 25(8), 425-466, 2008.
    Presenter: Darren Earl
  3. "Mars Exploration Rover Surface Operations: Driving Spirit at Gusev Crater" by R. Chris, et al.,
    Presenter: Michael Aherne
    "Visual Odometery on the Mars Exploration Rovers", by Y. Cheng, M. Maimone, and L. Matthies, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, June 2006
Note: course evaluations will be filled out in this class session.
Dec 16, 10am-5pm, RTH 406: FINAL PRESENTATIONS

Project presentations:
Project reports due! No late reports accepted.

Course Project
 The principles learned in this class will be applied in a required course project. Individual and team projects are both welcome. Team projects must follow the following guidelines:
  1. Teams must not exceed three students;
  2. The project scope must be a sum of the individual projects (i.e., a 3-person team must have a project that is 3X the scope of an individual project);
  3. The individual contribution of each team member must be clear;
  4. Individual and original (i.e., relevantly different based on the author's contribution) final reports must be turned in by each of the team members.
Theme

Each project is expected to be either an implementation of complex single robot (e.g., human-robot interaction), or of coordinated social behavior (e.g., cooperation on a task, competition, and/or learning) implemented on two or more robots (i.e., a robot team). Any of the test-beds below are appropriate.

Test-beds

Robotics PhD students in the course are expected to work with physical robots for their project(s). Other students may use the course-approved simulation testbeds. For simulation work to be relevant to real robotics, only the following programming environment will be used in the course: the Player/Stage/Gazebo suite, a growing standard for robot programming, found at http://playerstage.sourceforge.net. Player is a general purpose language-independent network server for robot control. Stage is a Player-compatible high-fidelity indoor multi-robot simulation test-bed. Gazebo is a Player-compatible high-fidelity 3D outdoor simulation testbed with dynamics. Stage and Gazebo are the accepted simulation test-testbeds for this course. Using Player/Stage/Gazebo also allows for direct porting to Player-compatible physical robots. Note that the syllabus gives specific dates by which simulation results are required before transitioning to physical robot hardware.

Robot hardware will be made available for use in the course. Platforms include a ActivMedia Pioneer 1 AT research grade robot, and 4 Evolution Robotics ER1 platforms. Aiming for real robot experiments is required, but it requires a compelling demonstration of working code in Stage/Gazebo to the TA and Professor by Nov 15th. You need to include this milestone in your project proposal and plan to make it. Obviously the various platforms have different capablities, (e.g., The ER1's are equipped with a web cam as the primary sensor, while the pioneer has no vision but a gripper and sonar ring). You are strongly encouraged to take all these factors into account when selecting a project to propose. Other important factors in project selection include the state of other support software (for example, porting from a Stage/Gazebo simulation to a Pioneer will likely be easiler than to an ER1 because of the state of the Player driver for the ER; you could propose to improve this status quo as part of your project).

Students who have existing access to physical robots through their research may use those physical systems as their project test-beds after prior approval by the TA or Professor to ensure course relevance. All projects, software and robot use is contingent on project proposal approval, as are any necessary project revisions.

Project proposals
Project proposals describing specific project goals, implementation plan and platform, and evaluation metrics are due in the first half of the semester, as stated in the syllabus. Guidelines to be followed in writing the proposal are found here. You can see an example of a well-written project proposal here.

Look here for a list of topics you should use as the basis for your project proposal. You may adapt/combine these ideas in your proposal, creativity within the realm of what is doable in the course of the semester is encouraged.

Project presentations
Final projects will be presented to the class on scheduled end-of-semester presentation days. Project presentations will be allotted 15-20 minutes, followed by a Q&A session. Live robot demos are encouraged but not required; if real robots are used in the project, videos of performace are expected. Helpful information for preparing your project presentation can be found here.

Final reports
A detailed final paper is a required part of the course project. Since technical writing is one of the skills you are expected to practice in this course, the final report is modeled on a journal paper, i.e., on a technical paper reporting research results to a peer review audience. The paper should be formatted using standard ACM specifications, found here: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. You may use either the ACM SIGS or the ACM Alternate style; they are almost identical. Both MS Word and LaTex templates are provided.

A hard-copy of the report is due on the last day of project presentations. Please also provide a URL with an on-line version of the report. Helpful information for preparing your project report can be found here.

Examples
An example of a successful project and project report can be found here. For examples of past projects and final papers, visit the previous course Web page. Not surprisingly, the bar for projects has been rising with each semester this class is taught.

Grading
 Performance in the class will be based on participation in class discussions, presentations of the readings, a quiz reviewing the basic concepts covered in the class, a weekly 1/2 page summary report for each of the papers, and a final project (with an associated paper and demonstration). Regular attendance and participation is required; if you need to miss a class, please speak to Prof. Matarić ahead of time.

Specifically, final course grades will consist of:

  • 25% weekly summary reports
  • 25% in-class discussion participation
  • 25% in-class paper presentations
  • 25% final project implementation and final paper
The USC Student Conduct Code prohibits plagiarism. All USC students, and therefore all students in this course, are responsible for reading and following the Student Conduct Code, which appears in the current SCampus. Also look here for useful information from the Office for Student Conduct, including a guide to avoiding plagiarism, which defines plagiarism and includes examples and explanations of effective and ineffective paraphrasing.

Students who violate University standards of academic integrity are subject to disciplinary sanctions, including failure in the course and suspension from the University. Since dishonesty in any form harms the individual, other students, and the University, policies on academic integrity will be strictly enforced. We expect you to familiarize yourself with the Academic Integrity guidelines found in the current SCampus. Violations of the Student Conduct Code will be filed with the Office of Student Conduct, and appropriate sanctions will be given.

Related Web Sites
Relevant Readings

The following is a collection of other papers that are relevant to this course, and/or have been used as readings in this course in the past. To see the current reading list for this course, look here.

This page has some pictures and links to other relevant pages.

  • Humanoid Robotics, G. A. Bekey, Autonomous Robots: From Biological Inspiration to Implementation and Control, MIT Press, 2005, pages 441-471 (Chapter 13).
  • "A Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robot : Reconfiguration Planning and Experiments", by Eiichi Yoshida, Satoshi Murata, Akiya Kamimura, Kohji Tomita, Haruhisa Kurokawa and Shigeru Kokaji, International Journal of Robotics Research, 21(10):903-916, October 2002.
  • "Towards terrain-aided navigation for underwater robots", Stefan Willams, Gamini Dissanayake and Hugh Durrant-Whyte, Advanced Robotics. 15(5) pages 533-549, 2001.
  • "Symbol Grounding via a Hybrid Architecture in an Autonomous Assembly System" by C. Malcolm and T. Smithers (1990)
  • "Becoming Increasingly Reliable" by R. Simmons (1994)
  • "Experiences with an Architecture for Intelligent, Reactive Agents" by P. Bonasso, J. Firby, E. Gat, D. Kortenkamp, D. Miller and M. Slack (1996)
  • "A Situated View of Representation and Control", Stanley Rosenschein and Leslie Kaelbling, Artificial Intelligence, Special Issue on Computational Research on Interaction and Agency, Elsevier Science, pages 515-540, January/February 1995.
  • "Internalized Plans: A Representation for Action Resources" by D. Payton (1990)
  • "Behavior-Based Control: Examples from Navigation, Learning, and Group Behavior", Maja J Matarić, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, special issue on Software Architectures for Physical Agents, H. Hexmoor, I. Horswill, and D. Kortenkamp (eds.), 9(2-3), pages 323-336, 1997.
  • "Fast Replanning for Navigation in Unknown Terrain", by Sven Koenig and Maxim Likhachev, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 21(3):354-364, June 2005.
  • "DAMN: A Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation" by J. Rosenblatt (1995)
  • "Situated Agents Can Have Goals" by P. Maes (1990)
  • "ALVINN: An Autonomous Land Vehicle in A Neural Network" by D. Pomerleau (1992)
  • "Rapidly Adapting Artificial Neural Networks for Autonomous Navigation" by D. Pomerleau (1992)
  • "Motor Schema Based Navigation for a Mobile Robot: An Approach to Programming by Behavior", Ron Arkin, Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-87), Raleigh, NC, pages 264-271, March 31 - April 3, 1987.
  • "Model-based Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation from the Dynamical Systems Perspective" by J. Tani (1996)
  • "Rapid, Safe, and Incremental Learning of Navigation Strategies" by J. Millan (1996)
  • "Using a Layered Control Architecture to Alleviate Planning with Incomplete Information", Pete Bonasso and David Kortenkamp, Proceedings, AAAI Spring Symposium: Planning with Incomplete Information for Robot Problems, Stanford, CA, AAAI Press, pages 1-4, March 1996.
  • "Behavior Coordination Mechanisms: State-of-the-Art", Paolo Pirjanian, Technical Report IRIS-99-375, Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, School of Engineering, University of Southern California, October 1999.
  • "Learning to use selective attention and short-term memory in sequential tasks" by A. McCallum (1996)
  • "RoboShepherd: Learning a Complex Behavior" by A. Schultz et al (1996)
  • "Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model", C. Reynolds, Computer Graphics, 21(4), pages 25-34, 1987.
  • "Artificial Fishes with Autonomous Locomotion: Perception, Behavior and Learning in a Simulated Physical World", Demetri Terzopoulos, X. Tu, and R. Grzeszczuk, Artificial Life, 1(4), pages 327-351, December 1994.
  • "Group Behaviors for Systems with Significant Dynamics", David Brogan and Jessica Hodgins, Autonomous Robots 4(1), pages 137-153, 1997.
  • "Group Behaviors for Systems with Significant Dynamics" by D. Brogan and J. Hodgins (1997)
  • "Multiagent Systems: A Survey from a Machine Learning Perspective" Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso, Autonomous Robots, 8(3), pages 345-383, 2000.
  • "From Local Actions to Global Tasks: Stigmergy and Collective Robotics" by R. Beckers et al (1994)
  • "Swarm-Made Architectures" by J. L. Deneubourg et al (1991)
  • "Macroscopic Model of an Aggregation Experiment Using Embodied Agents in Groups of Time-Varying Sizes", Proceedings, IEEE Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC), Hammamet, Tunisian, October 2002, pages 250-255.
  • "Market-Based Multi-Robot Planning in a Distributed Layered Architecture", Dani Goldberg, V. Cicirello, M.B. Dias, Reid Simmons, S. Smith, and Anthony Stentz, Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata: Proceedings, International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol. 2, 2003, pp. 27-38.
  • "An architecture for distributed cooperative-planning in a behavior-based multi-robot system" by D. Jung and A. Zelinsky (1999).
  • "Decentralized Motion Planning for Multiple Mobile Robots: The Cocktail Party Model" by V. Lumelsky and K. Harinarayan (1997)
  • "A Framework for Vision Based Formation Control," A. K. Das, R. Fierro, V. Kumar, J. P. Ostrowski, J. Spletzer, and C. J. Taylor (2002)
  • "Evolution of Subsumption Using Genetic Programming", John Koza, Towards a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, F. J. Varela and P. Bourgine (eds.), Paris, France, MIT Press, pages 110-119, 1992.
  • "Agents That Learn from Other Competitive Agents" by M. Asada et al (1995)
  • "Cooperative behavior acquisition for mobile robots in dynamically changing real worlds via vision-based reinforcement learning and development" by M. Asada, E. Uchibe and K. Hosoda (1999)
  • "Spontaneous, short-term interaction with mobile robots", Schulte, J., Rosenberg, C., Thrun, S., Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 10-15 May 1999, 658-663.
  • "Investigating Models of Social Development Using a Humanoid Robot"Brian Scassellati, in Biorobotics, Barbara Webb and Thomas Consi, eds., MIT Press, 2000.
  • "A Biological Perspective on Autonomous Agent Design" by R. Beer (1990)
  • "Robotic Experiments in Cricket Phonotaxis" by B. Webb (1994)
  • "Why Better Robots Make it Harder" by T. Smithers (1994)
  • "Noise and the Reality Gap: The Use of Simulation in Evolutionary Robotics" by N. Jakobi et al (1997)
  • "Animating Human Athletes", J. K. Hodgins and W. L. Wooten,Robotics Research: The Eighth International Symposium. Y. Shirai and S. Hirose (eds). Springer-Verlag: Berlin, 356-367
  • "Defining Socially Assistive Robotics", David J. Feil-Seifer and Maja J. Matarić, Poster paper in International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, Chicago, Illinois, Jun 2005.
  • "A Hands-Off Physical Therapy Assistance Robot for Cardiac Patients", Kyong Il Kang, Sanford Freedman, Maja J. Matarić, Mark J. Cunningham, and Becky Lopez. Poster paper in International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, Chicago, Illinois, Jun 2005.
  • "Hands-off Assistive Robotics for Post-Stroke Arm Rehabilitation", Jon Eriksson, Maja J. Matarić and Carolee J. Winstein. In International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, Chicago, Illinois, Jun 2005.
  • "User-Adaptive Control of a Magnetorheological Prosthetic Knee", Hugh Herr and Ari Wilkenfeld, Industrial Robot: An International Journal 2003; 30: 42-55.
  • "Evolving Electronic Robot Controllers that Exploit Hardware Resources", Arian Thompson, F. Moran, A. Moreno, J. J. Merelo, and P. Chacon (eds.), Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Artificial Life, 929, Springer-Verlag, pages 640-656, 1995.
  • Background reading on coevolution
  • "Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition", Karl Sims, Proceedings, Artificial Life IV, R. Brooks and P. Maes (eds.), MIT Press/Bradford Books, pages 28-39, 1994.
  • Background reading on Karl Sims' Virtual Creatures
  • "Generative Encodings for the Automated Design of Modular Physical Robots" Hornby G.S., Lipson H., Pollack. J.B., IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 19(4), pages 703-719, 2003.
  • "Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Robot Systems: A survey", Erfu Yang and Dongbing Gu, University of Essex Technical Report CSM-404.
  • "Cooperation without deliberation: A minimal behavior-based approach to multi-robot teams", Barry Werger, Artificial Intelligence, 110, pages 293-320, 1999.
  • "Cooperative transport by ants and robots", C. Ronald Kube and Eric Bonabeau, Robotics and Autonomous Systems 30(1-2), pages 85-101, 2000.
    A video of the box-pushing robots from the above paper.
  • "Distributed Mobile Robotics by the Method of Dynamic Teams", Jim Jennings and C. Kirkwood-Watts, Proceedings, International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems, Karlsruhe, Germany, May 1998.
  • "Dynamic Sensor Planning and Control for Optimally Tracking Targets" by J. Spletzer and C. J. Taylor, International Journal of Robotics Research,22(1), January 2003, pages 7-20.
  • "Minimalism + Distribution = Supermodularity", by B. Donald, J. Jennings, and D. Rus, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI, 9(20-3), 1997, pages 293-321.
  • "Mathematical Model of Foraging in a Group of Robots: Effect of Interference", by K. Lerman and A. Galstyan, Autonomous Robots, 13(2), 2002, pages 127-141.

  • A few relevant books:
    • Probabilistic Robotics, Sebastian Thurn, Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, MIT Press, 2005.
    • Autonomous Robots, George Bekey, MIT Press, 2006.
    • Mobile Robots, Inspiration to Implementation, Joe Jones & Anita Flynn, A. K. Peters.
    • Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning, Goldberg, Addison Wesley.
    • Artificial Life, Chris Langton, Addison Wesley.


Prof. Matarić's home page
USC Robotics Lab home page
USC Computer Science Department
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