This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

Archived Versions

Principles of Autonomy and Decision Making

As taught in: Fall 2005

An artist's rendering of the Mars rover on Mars.

Artist's rendering of Mars Exploration Rover. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.)

Instructors:

Prof. Brian Williams

Prof. Nicholas Roy

MIT Course Number:

16.410 / 16.413

Level:

Undergraduate / Graduate

Course Features

Course Description

This course surveys a variety of reasoning, optimization, and decision-making methodologies for creating highly autonomous systems and decision support aids. The focus is on principles, algorithms, and their applications, taken from the disciplines of artificial intelligence and operations research. Reasoning paradigms include logic and deduction, heuristic and constraint-based search, model-based reasoning, planning and execution, reasoning under uncertainty, and machine learning. Optimization paradigms include linear, integer and dynamic programming. Decision-making paradigms include decision theoretic planning, and Markov decision processes. This course is offered both to undergraduate (16.410) students as a professional area undergraduate subject, in the field of aerospace information technology, and graduate (16.413) students.