University of Bologna — Cesena · Prof. Andrea Roli · A.Y. 2025/2026

Intelligent Robotic Systems

16 chapters40 interactive widgets41 plates~11 hours of study

Course roadmap: foundations feed behaviour-based robotics, then adaptive behaviour, then deliberative control and finally methodology and advanced topics — Plate 00 — The road of the course. Foundations (the definition of a robot, its history, adaptivity, control architectures), then behaviour-based robotics (reactive control, subsumption, fusion, behavior trees), then the three ways of obtaining adaptive behaviour (swarms, evolution, learning), and finally deliberative control and the methodology of experimental robot science.

How to study

The chapters are in dependency order: read them from the beginning. Every chapter consolidates in one place everything the lectures said about a topic.
The plates are archival technical diagrams reconstructed from the slides: read them as figures, not decoration. The widgets (simulators, steppers, explorers) are worked implementations of the mechanisms — use them actively.
Each chapter ends with “Check your understanding”: collapsible exam-style questions with answers in the exact wording of the course.
Every chapter footer lists the lecture decks it comes from; sources are the official course slides, not redistributed.

I

Foundations

Plate: the sensory-motor loop between agent and environment — Tav. I — The sensory-motor loop

II

Behaviour-based robotics

Plate: three behaviour layers with suppression links into an arbiter — Tav. II — Layers, suppression, arbitration

III

Adaptive behaviour

Plate: the evolutionary loop from population through evaluation, selection and variation — Tav. III — The evolutionary loop

IV

Deliberative control

Plate: the sense-model-plan-act cycle — Tav. IV — The deliberative cycle

V

Methodology and advanced topics

Plate: controller, body and environment coupled in both directions — Tav. V — Body, control, environment