Overview
Imagine you want to build your first robot program. The goal sounds simple: a robot should help you set the table for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. It needs to get things like milk from the fridge and place them on the table.
But very quickly, you run into problems.
How does the robot know where the milk is? What if it can’t see it? What if the fridge is closed? And how does it decide what to do first—look for the milk, or open the fridge?
These questions show that building even a “simple” robot is actually quite complex. Robots don’t understand the world like humans do. They need to perceive their environment, store knowledge, and plan actions in the right order. Sometimes, they even need to act first (like opening a door) before they can perceive what they are looking for.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn the basics of cognitive robotics by solving exactly this kind of problem step by step. Over four sessions (each about 2 hours), you will explore the key ideas that allow robots to act intelligently:
1) Building the world: Create a simple environment with objects like a table and a fridge.
2) Include the robot in your world. Learn how a robot detects objects using sensors.
3) Knowledge & reasoning: Understand how a robot represents what it knows (for example, that milk is inside the fridge).
4 Planning & action: Program the robot to choose the right sequence of actions (like opening the fridge before searching for the milk).
By the end, you’ll have a robot that can successfully complete the task, and a solid understanding of how robots “think” and interact with the world.