Principles of Autonomy and Decision Making
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this survey of reasoning, optimization, and decision making methods used to build autonomous systems and decision support aids, drawing on artificial intelligence and operations research. Topics include logic and deduction, heuristic and constraint-based search, model-based reasoning, planning and execution, and machine learning on the reasoning side, linear, integer, and dynamic programming on the optimization side, and decision theoretic planning and Markov decision processes for decision making under uncertainty. Materials come from MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and include lecture notes, assignments, and readings covering the algorithms and their application to real autonomous systems. The course is free to access and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, with no certificate offered. It suits students wanting a grounding in the AI and operations research techniques behind autonomous decision-making systems.