This is a midterm exam that I gave to a robotics class in 1998. It is up to you to determine which, if any, of these questions are relevant to the material we are currently studying.
Question 1. Safety.
Who or what needs to be protected in an environment in which robots are present? (Give three examples.)
How can we help to ensure the safe operation of the robot? (Give two types of safeguards we could add for each of the three examples you gave above and explain how each safeguard would help.)
Question 2. Ethics.
When designing a robot, who should be the roboticists primary concern?
Him or her self.
People who work alongside the robot.
Employer.
General Public.
Person(s) whose job(s) could be lost to the robot.
Future generations.
Other. List:
Why?
Question 3. Kinematics.
Given the robot arm shown above, find the forward kinematics equations that give the x, y, z, and "Cartesian roll" of the gripper, given angles θ1, θ2, θ3, and displacement d.
Given the same arm, find the inverse kinematics equations that give angles θ1, θ2, θ3, and displacement d, for a given x, y, z, and "Cartesian roll" of the gripper.
(For both parts, the x, y, and z coordinate axes originate at the base of the robot.)
Question 4. Planning.
In the "three towers" problem, the objective is to go from all three rings stacked largest on the bottom and smallest on the top on the left peg, to largest on the bottom and smallest on the top on the right peg. Only one ring may be moved at a time, and a larger ring may not be placed on a smaller ring.
Give a symbolic state representation of this problem and an operator for transforming one state to another. The operator should be general enough to solve the problem, if used repeatedly and with the right operands given in the right order. The operator should include preconditions for application and changes to the state resulting from application.