CS395T: Autonomous Robots -- Final Project

Final Project

 
Your final programming project is to do something interesting with the Aibo robots. You may try to build on some of the research papers you have read about in the class; you may try to reimplement something you've found interesting that other teams have done; you try to do something that has never been done before; you may write new code from scratch; you may modify existing code. It's up to you!

You are expected to work as a team of 2 people. 2-person teams should only turn in one submission of the programming portion of the assignment. However, each person must turn in an independently-written proposal and final report.

The schedule is as follows.

  • Project Proposal due on Thursday, October 27th at 11:59pm.
    •     Submit a proposal as plain text by email to Dan and Peter, including:  
       
    The proposal should be written with the goal of convincing us that what you are proposing to do is interesting and non-trivial (though not necessarily completely original - see below). Members of 2-person teams should clearly identify what their roles will be with relation to the overall project.

    It is completely legitimate to propose to do something based on something you read about provided that you are going to do the coding yourself. Just make sure to acknowledge any ideas (and code) that you borrow and be sure to clearly identify what you are going to do.

    Be as specific as you can at this point. The more specific you are, the more detailed feedback you will get.
  • Your final Project due on Thursday, December 8th at 12:30pm.
       Submit your final project including:

  • Source code and executable. 
  • A README providing a brief guide to following your code (including which files are most relevant to look at, etc.). Make sure it is absolutely clear how to run your code.
  • A detailed written report describing your project, including its merits, and its deficincies. As much as possible, you should relate your approach to the readings from throughout the course. View this report as a term paper. It is in place of a final exam and will be a large factor in your final grade for the project and for the course. The report should be roughly in the style of a conference paper, including introduction, motivation, related work, etc.
  • Members of 2-person teams should clearly identify what their roles have been in relation to the overall project. All writing should be your own -- even if you are describing a component produced by your partner.
  • Include at least citations with full bibliographic references to acknowledge where your ideas came from.
  • Be very clear about what code you've used from other sources, if any. Clear citations are essential. Failure to credit ideas and code from external sources is cheating.
  • Make sure you evaluate both the good and bad points of your approach.
  • Show results of at least one experiment evaluating some aspect of or your entire approach, preferably showing error bars or some sort of statistical measure of the significance. Even if you didn't accomplish your goal, evaluate what you did do.
  • If any parameteres are mentioned in the report, be sure to mention how you arrived at their values. Was it the first thing you tried? Trial and error? Roughly how many trials? etc.
  • Remember to proofread and spell-check!
  • Project demos in class on Thursday, December 8th at 12:30pm.

  • Prepare to describe your project to your classmates.
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