(Spring 2026)
Overview
This course will cover the techniques required to design robots capable of intelligent decision-making. The course will proceed through several levels of the control stack required for such robots, from low-level perception and control, through spatial perception and motion planning, through object manipulation, to high-level planning.
A major goal of this course is to present a structuralist view of the robotics control stack, via the unifying theoretical framework of the decision process.
Students should be both mathematically sophisticated and competent programmers.
Staff
Instructor
George Konidaris
Office: CIT 447
gdk at brown dot edu
 GTA Tuluhan Akbulut tuluhan_akbulut at brown.edu |
 GTA Benned Hedegaard benned_hedegaard at brown.edu |
Schedule
Lectures are held Tuesdays and Thursdays 1pm-2:20pm in CIT 316.
| Date | Topic |
| January 22nd | Introduction and Course Outline |
| January 27th | Decision Processes |
| January 29th | Sensors and Actuators |
| Febuary 3rd | Sensorimotor Control |
| February 5th | Introduction to ROS 2 (Guest Lecture) |
| February 10th | Localization and Mapping |
| February 12th | Path Planning |
| February 17th | no lecture - President's Day long weekend |
| February 19th | Spatial Perception |
| February 24th | Motion Planning |
| February 26th | Review Session |
| March 3rd | Midterm (in class) |
| March 5th | Object Recognition, Pose Estimation, Semantic Maps |
| March 10th | Object Shape Estimation |
| March 12th | Object State Estimation |
| March 17th | Object Manipulation |
| March 19th | Skills |
| March 24th | Spring break |
| March 26th | Spring break |
| March 31st | Foundation Models for Manipulation |
| April 2nd | Task-Level State |
| April 7th | Action-Oriented Semantic Maps |
| April 9th | Task-Level Planning |
| April 14th | Object-Level Planning |
| April 16th | slack |
| April 21st | Applications and Industry |
| April 23rd | Social and Ethical Issues |
The final exam will be Friday, May 15th at 9am.
Assignments
There will be four assignments, released throughout the semester, in addition to the midterm and final.
Resources
The official textbook of the course is Introduction to Automous Robots by Correll, Hayes, Heckman, and Roncone:
This textbook is open access, and you can download and compile it for free here
Additionally, I will likely also draw from the following excellent textbooks, which you may find of interest:
- Modern Robotics, by Lynch and Park, freely downloadable here.
- Robotics: Modelling, Planning, and Control by Siciliano, Sciavicco, Villani, and Oriola.
- Robotics, Vision and Control by Corke, which you can download via Brown here.