« Thursday, Nov 13: A little history, some little robots | Main | Posting on CSCS »
November 14, 2003
URL of potential interest
Numbers were down this week. Whats up?
Either way, we closed by trying to build some simple agents capable of following walls or (not) falling off the table. The session started with my quick review of the history of mobile robotics. If you want to follow up on anything I talked about (or if you prefer, "sites I stole content from"), you might check out:
- Robotics History http://trueforce.com/Articles/Robot_History.htm
- Image supplements from ROBOT: Mere Machine to Transcendental Mind http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/fig.ch2/
- W. Grey Walter: The Machina Speculatrix (Elise and Elmer) http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n09/historia/documentos_i.htm
- What is LOGO? (A history from the LOGO Foundation) http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/logo/
- The Dallas Personal Robotics Group http://www.dprg.org/index.html (Actually, I didn't steal anything from them, but they have a lot of ideas there.)
- Intelligence Without Representation (1991) http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/brooks91intelligence.html The bits about Rodney Brooks and the subsumption architecture. (I couldn't find his paper A robust layered control system for a mobile robot online, but this paper, as well as Intelligence Without Reason (1991), Elephants Don't Play Chess (1990), and From Earwigs to Humans are probably all good reads.)
- #94 : Flying Monkeys An interview with Nikko, the head flying monkey from the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. From the website Top 100 Monsters of All Time.
I think that sums it up. Ah. I also mentioned Valentino Braitenburg's Vehicles; you can get a sense for some of the stuff in the book here, but I still recommend the book.
And, since I'm linking to things, if you're generally looking for interesting/seminal/mind-blowing things in computing to read, I'd start with Michael Eisenberg's paper Creating a Computer Science Canon (PS, or PDF from the ACM Digital Library; free when you download it on campus).
Posted by mjadud at November 14, 2003 12:12 AM