In recent years, autonomous vehicles have received an increasing amount of attention from academia, government laboratories and industry due to their wide applicability in many potential domains such as autonomous driving, space exploration, network-centric warfare, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), humanitarian demining, post-disaster search and rescue missions and environment monitoring to name just a few. Autonomous vehicles are intelligent systems that can function and interact autonomously within unstructured, dynamic and sometimes partially observable environments without explicit human guidance. These vehicles employ intelligent techniques to mimic human intelligence in decision making, problem solving, learning from the environment and adapting to its changes. An autonomous vehicle should be able to answer questions like “Where am I?”, “Where am I going?”, “What does the world look like?”, “How to explore an unknown environment?”, “How can I get there from here?”, “How to achieve intelligent connection between perception and action?” and “how to update with unexpected events?”. This course aims at providing students with the basics required to design and control an autonomous vehicle and explains the intelligent algorithms that make this vehicle able to answer the aforementioned questions autonomously. It covers different aspects of autonomous vehicles such as locomotion, localization, state estimation, control, environment mapping and motion planning and learning. Without assuming any prior knowledge of artificial intelligence, the course provides an introduction to the key artificial intelligence issues involved in the development of autonomous vehicles.

Course Instructor: Dr. Alaa Khamis
Email: alaakhamis[at]gmail[dot]com
Office: TBD
Office hours: TBD

Course TAs:
Eng. Ahmed Khairy
Email: akhairy[at]zewailcity[dot]edu[dot]eg
Office: TBD
Office hours: TBD
Junior TA: Mahmoud Abdul Galil
Email: s-mahmoud[dot]abdelgalil[at]zewailcity[dot]edu[dot]eg
Office: TBD
Office hours: TBD

Textbook:
- R. Siegwart and I. Nourbakhsh . Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots. MIT Press, 2004.
- Thomas Braunl. Embedded Robotics. Springer, 2006.
- Robin Murphy . Introduction to AI Robotics. MIT Press, 2000.
- Phillip McKerrow. Introduction to Robotics. Addison-Wesley, 1991.
- Mark Lee. Intelligent Robotics. Halsted Press and Open University Press, 1989.
Lectures will be based mainly, but not exclusively, on material in these textbooks. Lectures will not follow the same sequence as the material presented in the texts.