We describe the possibility of using the Lego Mindstorms robots to support the ACM Computing Curriculum 2001, using them in lab exercises and projects for classes from beginning courses in programming to advanced courses in operating systems, compilers, networks and artificial intelligence. We first describe the limitations of the robots, both hardware and software, and some third-party programming environments that overcome some of these limitations. Finally, we describe our own work on a package of tools called MTM that eliminates most of the remaining limitations. MTM includes enhanced firmware that allows point-to-point communication and the reading of the machine state, a C++ API for programming the robots, and packages, in both Common Lisp and Java, for programming the robots and for remotely controlling them.
The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the explosion of available information has made web search a time consuming and complex process. The large number of information sources and their different levels of accessibility, reliability and associated costs present a complex information gathering control problem. This paper describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system-a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosion is an information gathering agent, BIG, that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities.
This paper examines LEGO Mindstorms 'TM suitability as a hardware platform for integrating robotics into an Artificial Intelligence course organized around the agent paradigm popularized by Russell and Norvig. This evaluation discusses how kits and projects based on Mindstorms supported students' exploration of the issues behind the design of agents from three classes in Russell and Norvig's intelligent agent taxonomy. The paper's investigation also examines several popularly-perceived limitations of the Mindstorms package for college-level robotics projects and shows that most of these "limitations" are not serious impediments to Mindstorms' use, while certain other of these "limitations" do indeed present challenges to the platform's use.
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