Cyberbotics' Robot Curriculum/About this book

Learning about Intelligent Robots
This book is intended for students, teachers, people that have this as a hobby, and researchers interested in the most intelligent robots. It will help you in understanding what robots are, what they can do for you, and most interestingly how to program them so you can have the perfect robot for you. It includes two parts: a short theoretical part and a longer practical part. The practical part is decomposed in one chapter about the computer configuration and five chapters of exercises corresponding to five levels of difficulty. After reading this book, you should be able to design your own intelligent robots.

From Beginners to Robotics Experts
Even if you never wrote a computer program before, you will learn easily how to graphically program the behavior of a simple robot. From this first experience, you will be smoothly introduced to higher level computer programming to discover more possibilities of intelligent robots. This practical investigation is organized in projects for which a difficulty level is associated. You are free to stop at any level if the projects suddenly become too difficult to handle, but if you reach the latest levels successfully, you should consider yourself as a genuine robotics researcher! Here are the levels of difficulty:


 * Beginner: no prior knowledge needed, suitable for children from 8 years old and people without a scientific background (see Beginner programming Exercises)
 * Novice: scientific or technological interest needed, suitable for children from 8 years old (see Novice programming Exercises)
 * Intermediate: general computer science background needed, intended to student from 12 years old with some interest in computer science (see Intermediate programming Exercises)
 * Advanced: programming skills needed, intended to post-graduate students and researchers (see Advanced Programming Exercises)
 * Expert: research spirit needed, intended to post-graduate students and researchers (see Cognitive Benchmarks)

Easy-to-use robotics Tools
The practical part of this book relies on a couple of software and hardware tools that will allow you to practice intelligent robot programming for real life. These tools are the e-puck robot and the webots software. They are both widely used for education and research in universities worldwide and are commercially available and well supported. These tools will be described in chapter E-puck and Webots.

Enjoy Robot Competitions
Several exercises are provided along with this book. Starting from very simple introductory exercises in chapter Beginner programming Exercises, the reader will learn progressively how to create more and more advanced robotics controllers throughout the following chapters. Finally, the chapter Cognitive Benchmarks will introduce the reader into the realm of robot competitions through a cognitive benchmark: Rat's Life .