Unifying Undergraduate Artificial Intelligence Robotics

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. An examination of the current robotics textbooks (McKerrow 1991; Arkin 1998; Dudek and Jenkin 2000; Murphy 2000; Niku 2001; Siegwart and Nourbakhsh 2004; Craig 2005; Choset et al. 2005) indicates that these subfields are traditional planning-based robotics, behavior-based robotics, probabilistic robotics, mobile robotics, and engineering robotics.