Teaching Powerful Ideas With Autonomous Mobile Robots

Core computer science is about virtual machines, whereas computer applications and robotics are about the real world. The hypothesis that we will pursue in this paper is that real‐world autonomous robots provide a tool that enables us to learn about how to design intelligent computer systems for the real world. They can teach us many powerful ideas about intelligence and computer systems in general. We will show a number of case studies illustrating how complex behaviors can be achieved by very simple mechanisms (e.g. how robots can clean up without knowing about it), and how robots learn to form concepts about the real world depending on how they are built. We also show how intelligence does not require central control and how the real world is not something to fight against, but something to live with and to exploit beneficially. We discuss how real‐world autonomous agents can be used to teach an interdisciplinary audience. Finally, we discuss potential ways in which ideas like the ones developed in this paper might eventually change computer science.