Teaching

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Current teaching activities

I am a lecturer at the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI).

Robotics Lecture

Objectives

Understanding the foundation of robotics is essential for building complete knowledge of artificial systems. Intelligence appears when a physical life-form is interacting with the environment and it can only be observed in an interactive process. Artificial systems cannot be fully understood by simulating them, because generalisation from real embodied systems to simulated systems leads always to an oversimplification of the real world and its challenges. Upon completion of the robotics course, students should have learned about the different classes of robots, their application areas and their varying concepts of programming and problem solving strategies. The learned theoretical skills will be applied to hands-on examples and exercises in the robotic laboratory, both helpful for the full understanding of the concepts and for inspiring students own ideas and further research.

Contents

The course includes the following topics: Overview of Robotics in Practice and Research; Sensors and Actuators; Low Level Feedback Control; Computer Vision for Robotics; Robotic Manipulation; Legged Locomotion; High Level Behavior Control; Planning, Execution and Learning; Navigation, Localisation and Mapping; Sensor Fusion, Communication and Swarm Robotics.

References

More books, on-line documents, tutorials, selected book chapters and articles will be announced in the lectures.

Links

Robotics Lab

Objectives

The learned theoretical skills of the robotic lecture will be applied to hands-on examples and exercises in the robotic laboratory. After the course the students will understand the complexity and difficulties in real robot applications. Additionally, they will be able to identify their own research interests and ideas in the field of robotics.

Contents

The course includes the following topics: Programming methods for different kinds of robots; Using and integrating sensors and actuators for navigation, localisation and mapping of mobile robots; Applying computer vision algorithms on real robotic tasks; Implementing and using different levels of robotic behavior control.

Teaching mode

There is one four hour laboratory session each second week. Attendance is mandatory.

References

On-line documents will be announced in the lectures.

Links

Systems Programming

Objectives

Systems Programming covers the fundamentals of computer systems programming, machine organisation, and performance tuning. This course provides a solid background in systems programming and a deep understanding of low-level machine organisation and design. Topics include C programming, program optimisation, memory hierarchy, dynamic memory management, concurrency, threads, interprocess communication, and synchronisation. The course also covers the practical aspects and tools for successful C programming such as Make, debugging, source code control.

Contents

References

On-line documents will be announced in the lectures.

Links

Last change November 2014, Alexander Förster