New website for AY 2020/21

News

2020-10-25: The next exam whose official date is 2020-10-26 will be done remotely, due to the worsening COVID situation. Send an email to Tiziano and Giorgio to be scheduled. The exams will take place on the Wednesdays of the upcoming weeks.

2020-05-18: Due to bureaucracy issues, we have to close the exam reports for all the sessions. For those of you that have completed the written part, but still have not delivered the project is not necessary to book for another session. When you complete the project, just send an email to Tiziano and Prof. Grisetti and the exam will be verbalized automatically by them.

2020-04-28: The Faculty has published the OPIS code for this course: XRDU8U3E. Use it when you fill the form on infostud.

2020-01-20: Amended Rules for the Exam. The project is worth up to 3 points.

2019-10-28: Next Friday lectures will take place in Room A4, instead of Room A5

2019-10-18: Today's lecture MOVED to Room A7

2019-10-01: EXERCISE - bring a laptop and clone the repo today (2019-09-30), after 19:00.

2019-09-30: updated slides on dynamic Bayesian nets (04).

Abstract

This course aims at providing the students with the necessary mathematical background and the practical guidelines to tackle complex problems in state estimation and model identification for robots. At the end of this course the student will possess the necessary background to approach fundamental problems in robotics including, but not limited to localization, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), calibration and tracking.

Prerequisites

Despite this course in the "manifesto" is scheduled for the first year of the MARR/AIRO studies, it requires reasonably solid notions of Linear Algebra, Robotics 1 (or their italian versions Geometria and Robotica 1) and Autonomous and Mobile Robotics. For this reason, we recommend the students to sustain the exam on the second year.

Exam

ECTS Credits: 6

How to complete the credits for this module: After attending classes, students should:

• develop a small project.

• sustain a written exam.

Next Exams:

• Date: 08/01/2020, Time: 9.00 to 13.00, Place: Room B2, Via Ariosto 25 (reserved for erasmus and students enrolled before 2018/2019 )

• Date: 17/1/2020, Time: 9.00 to 13.00, Place: Rooms A4/A5, Via Ariosto 25 (students that partecipate to the 08/01 cannot attend this exam)

  • Solutions

  • Results (17 means NO PASS, so you have to repeat the written part)

  • On the 27/01/2020 in Room A7 at 14.00, students can take a look at their exams and eventually accept the grade (this can be done also by email)

  • This is just the written part evaluation, not your final grade.

• Date: 29/01/2020, Time: 9.00 to 13.00, Place: Room B2, Via Ariosto 25 (moved forward - see line below)

• Date: 07/02/2020, Time: 9.00 to 13.00, Place: Room B2, Via Ariosto 25

  • Solutions

  • Results

• Date: 10/02/2020, Time: 14.00 to 16.00, Place: Room A7, Via Ariosto 25 (reserved for erasmus and students enrolled before 2018/2019. Those who attend to the 07/02 cannot attend this exam )

• Date: 26/03/2020, Time: 14.00 to 18.00, Place : Room A7, Via Ariosto 25

• Date: 07/04/2020, Time: 11:00 to 13.00, Place : Room B2 Via Ariosto 25

• Date: 12/05/2020, Time: 14:00 to 19.00, Place: Google Meet (Access with your institutional account)

  • Results

• Date: 10/06/2020, Time: 10.00 to 13.00, Place: Room B2, Via Ariosto 25

• Date: 08/07/2020, Time: 10.00 to 13.00, Place: Room B2, Via Ariosto 25

  • Results

• Date: 02/09/2020, Time: 9.00 to 13.00, Place: Room B2, Via Ariosto 25

  • Given the current situation of the COVID-19, it is possible to take the exam in oral form if you can prove the impossibility of being present in the classroom during the exam. The date will be established after the written exam. The two modalities are mutually exclusive.

  • Results

• Date: 26/10/2020, Time: TBD, Place: TBD

A reminder on what a mark means

• The grade is on the test not on the student: a brilliant student can make a test that scores poorly, and a lucky student can make a test that scores high.

• We evaluate the tests. We do not judge the students.

• Anxiety sucks.

• If you (after looking at the solutions) don't feel your mark is correct we might have misunderstood something (or you wrote hieroglyphs). Come and ask for explanations.

Preliminary Program

• Probability Primer

  • Axioms of probability

  • Bayes Rule, Chain Rule, Marginalization and Conditioning

  • Statistical independence

• Manipulating pdf representations: marginalizing, conditioning, applying a function

  • Discrete

  • Gaussian

  • Particles

• Dynamic Systems

  • System Model (state, observations, controls)

  • Filtering (Discrete , Kalman and Particle)

• Geometry and Linear Algebra Refresher

  • vectors, matrices and their operations, SO(X) groups, SE(X) groups

  • computation of gradients (symbolic, numerical and automatic differentiation)

• Applications of Filtering

  • Localization (Kalman and Particle)

• SLAM (Kalman and Particle)

• Least Squares Estimation

  • Gauss-Newton and Levenberg/Marquardton Euclidean Spaces

  • Probabilistic Interpretation

  • Manifolds

  • Robust Kernels

• Applications of Least Squares Estimation

  • Calibration

  • Sensor Registration (ICP, Bearing-only, Range-Only)

• Sparse Least Squares

  • Structure of the problem

  • Factor Graphs

  • Sparse Solvers

• Applications of Sparse Least Squares

  • Graph-SLAM

  • Simultaneous Localization, Calibration and Mapping

• Data Association

  • Mahalanobis Distance

  • Voting and Consensus Methods (RANSAC and variants)

Tentative schedule of the lectures

Week 1: Intro, Sensors, Mobile Platforms, Probability

Week 2: Manipulating PDF

Week 3: Dynamic Systems, Filtering, Discrete Filters

Week 4: Kalman Filters

Week 5: Gaussian Filters

Week 6: Wrapup on Filtering and Applictions: Localization and SLAM

Week 7: Least Squares Estimation

Week 7: Least Squares Estimation, Applications: Calibration, Sensor Registration

Week 8: Sparse Least Squares

Week 9: Applications of Sparse Least Squares: Graph-SLAM

Week 10: Data Association

Week 11: Wrapup and Applications