Unifying Undergraduate Artificial Intelligence Robotics: Layers of Abstraction over Two Channels

From a computer science and artificial intelligence perspective, robotics often appears as a collection of disjoint, sometimes antagonistic subfields. The lack of a coherent and unified presentation of the field negatively affects teaching, especially to undergraduates. This article presents an alternative synthesis of the various subfields of AI robotics and shows how these traditional subfields fit into the whole. Finally, it presents a curriculum based on these ideas.