CiteSeerX -- Interacting with the real world: a way of teaching Artificial Intelligence concepts

We describe a variety of projects developed as part of a course in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Minnesota. The projects cover navigation of small mobile robots and learning to accomplish simple tasks, and require a variety of approaches from neural networks to genetic programming to reactive behaviors. The projects have all been implemented on real robots. We discuss how the combination of robotics with Artificial Intelligence adds value to the learning of AI concepts and how the fun of building and programming a robot is a highly motivating force for the learning process. 1 Introduction The major goal of this paper is to describe examples of integration of real robotics projects in a course in Artificial Intelligence. The examples presented here are some of the class projects done by students taking a course in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Minnesota.