Welcome to your Artificial Behavior workshop! AI is a field in constant development, especially nowadays, making it often hard to keep up with. To say now you work with or in AI is like saying 20 years ago that you worked in or with a computer, as the number of subfields has exploded. We can broadly separate them in two, AI as a functionality (web page indexing, recommendation systems, generative AI, text and image analysys...) or as an entity (mainly agents and robots). In this workshop, we will focus on artificial entities, and in particular build their behavior. In particulary, you will learn about how robots perceive and interact with their environment, and how they can collaborate together to acheive complex tasks.
In this workshop, we will use the ARGoS robot simulator, and the epuck2 robot. Both are academic and professional standards used in laboratories and research all around the world. This is also what is used at the MPI, and what will be used our future the robotic arena. You might in the near future run your code on real robots!
After setting up our environment, we will familiarize ourselves with the robots' actuators and sensors, develop a navigation system, tackle a foraging task, and finally teach them how to communicate! All that is sumed up in the menu on the left.
A few recommendations for those not used to code:
- Get your hands dirty. You'll only learn if you write and run code. Run all pieces of code presented in the workshop, tweak them, explore and make them your own.
- Don't copy paste. The more you write, the more you remember!
- Regularly clean your code. According to Boileau, "Whatever is well conceived is clearly said". This works in reverse as well: a clean code is easier to keep in mind, maintain and grow. So indent your code, get rid of stuff you don't use (or comment it for future usage) and group your code in blocks.
Now that you have a broad view of the course, let's dive in!