Lectures
Day 1: Syllabus
Day 2: A short history of AI
Day 3: Embodied Cognition
Syllabus
Instructor: Josh Bongard [email protected] Office Hours.
T.A.: Nate Gaylinn [email protected] Office Hours.
This course will explore the automated design of autonomous machines using evolutionary algorithms. The course will cover relevant topics in evolutionary computation, artificial neural networks, robotics, biomechanics, simulation and computer designed organisms. Students will conduct a major Python programming project that will span the course and thus provide hands-on experience with the topics covered. Students will use their developed system to perform a pre-specified evolutionary robotics experiment.
Schedule
| Day | Date | Section | Lecture | title | Ugrads | Grads | Recording | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tues | 1/13/2026 | 1. Introduction | L01 | Course logistics; why robots? | Q1 | Q1 | ”Evolutionary Robotics” | |
| Thurs | 1/15/2026 | L02 | A short history of AI | Reading, pp. 5-11 | ||||
| Tues | 1/20/2026 | L03 | Embodied cognition | |||||
| Thurs | 1/22/2026 | 2. Tools of the trade | L04 | Artificial neural networks | ||||
| Tues | 1/27/2026 | L05 | Evolutionary algorithms | |||||
| Thurs | 1/29/2026 | L06 | Physical simulation | |||||
| Tues | 2/3/2026 | 3. History | L07 | The First Years of Evolutionary Robotics | ||||
| Thurs | 2/5/2026 | L08 | [[Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks | CTRNNs]] | ||||
| Tues | 2/10/2026 | L09 | Minimal Cognition | |||||
| Thurs | 2/12/2026 | L10 | Active Categorical Perception | |||||
| Tues | 2/17/2026 | 4. Locomotion | L11 | Legged Locomotion | ||||
| Thurs | 2/19/2026 | L12 | Bipedal Locomotion | |||||
| Tues | 2/24/2026 | Challenge 5.1: Encodings | L13 | NEAT / HyperNEAT | ||||
| Thurs | 2/26/2026 | C5.2: Crossing the reality gap | L14 | The GOLEM Project | ||||
| Thurs | 3/5/2026 | L15 | Resilient Machines | |||||
| Tues | 3/17/2026 | L16 | Transferability | |||||
| Thurs | 3/19/2026 | C5.3: Scalability | L17 | Self-replicating robots | ||||
| Tues | 3/24/2026 | 6. Collective robotics | L18 | Swarm Robotics | ||||
| Thurs | 3/26/2026 | L19 | The Evolution of Communication | |||||
| Tues | 3/31/2026 | 7. Evolving Bodies & Brains | L20 | Rigid Robots | ||||
| Thurs | 4/2/2026 | L21 | Soft Robots | |||||
| Tues | 4/7/2026 | L22 | Differentiable Robots | |||||
| Thurs | 4/9/2026 | L23 | Meta-robots | |||||
| Tues | 4/14/2026 | L24 | Biological Robots (“xenobots”) | |||||
| Day before exam | 11:59 PM | Written report and oral presentation due | ||||||
| Exam period | 7:30 AM | Final project presentations |