UTK COSC 494/594: Course Schedule (Spring 2026)

Week Date Lecture Material Assignment
1 Jan 21 Introduction and Course Overview
1 Jan 23 Anatomy of an Autonomous Robot
2 Jan 26 Recursive Bayesian Filtering
2 Jan 28 Recursive Bayesian Filtering
2 Jan 30 Motion and Observation Models
3 Feb 2 Motion and Observation Models
3 Feb 4 Particle Filter
3 Feb 6 Particle and Kalman Filtering
4 Feb 9 Kalman Filtering and EKF
4 Feb 11 EKF and SLAM
4 Feb 13 Paper Presentation
5 Feb 16 Presidents' Day (No Class) Project 1 Due
5 Feb 18 Introduction to Feedback Control
5 Feb 20 Paper Presentation
6 Feb 23 PID Control
6 Feb 25 PID Control and Pure Pursuit
6 Feb 27 Paper Presentation
7 Mar 2 Pure Pursuit and LQR
7 Mar 4 LQR and MPC
7 Mar 6 Paper Presentation
8 Mar 16 Introduction to Feedback Control
8 Mar 18 Sampling-based MPC and Lyapunov Stability
8 Mar 20 Smoky FIRST Robotic Competition (No Class)
9 Mar 23 Introduction to Planning and Heuristic Search Project 2 Due
9 Mar 25 Graph Construction for Search
9 Mar 27 Paper Presentation
10 Mar 30 Graph Construction for Search
10 Apr 1 A* search, Lazy Search
11 Apr 6 Lazy A* and RRT
11 Apr 8 Lazy A* and RRT
11 Apr 10 Paper Presentation
12 Apr 13 Imitation learning
12 Apr 15 Imitation learning
12 Apr 17 Paper Presentation Project 3 Due
13 Apr 20 Model-Free RL
13 Apr 22 Model-Free RL
13 Apr 24 Paper Presentation
14 Apr 27 Model-Based RL
14 Apr 29 Model-Based RL
14 May 1 Paper Presentation
15 May 4 Recap
15 May 6 Recap/Summary
16 May 14 Project 4 Due