A primary reason to build intelligent robots is to accomplish missions. For this project, the mission is to give tours. This project will give you experience designing, implementing, testing, demonstrating, and reporting on robot software to carry out missions.
The goals of this assignment are:
You will design, implement, test, demonstrate, and report on software of your choice targeted toward the OU TurtleBots and intended to help with the mission of acting as a robot tour guide, similar to what was described in Homework 3.
Exactly what software you choose to create and present is up to you; however, you must be able to make a convincing argument for why this software would be helpful for this mission and why designing, implementing, testing, demonstrating, and reporting on this software is an appropriate accomplishment for a half-semester project worth 50% of the course grade in a 4000/5000-level computer science course on intelligent mobile robotics with a team of whatever size you decide to work with. (Appropriate here means large and complex enough to be challenging and interesting, yet not too large and complex to be doable.) Overall, this is a chance for you to get creative and innovative, while at the same time being practical and realistic.
You should submit an electronic copy of your progress report slides through Canvas.
Draft Slides Due: 11:59 pm, Wednesday, 10 November 2021.
Final Slides Due: 9:59 am, Wednesday, 17 November 2021.
Each team will submit a draft and final written report on their project. Both the draft report and the final report have the same required contents. The draft report will be graded on a ✓+ / ✓ / ✓– (check-plus/check/check-minus) scheme only and is intended primarily to allow me to provide you with feedback that you can use to improve the quality of your final report. The final report will be point graded.
Your report will be modeled on a technical report that might be published by a laboratory. This will have the same basic structure as a conference paper or journal article but without the fancy formatting or severe page limits. Your report will have the following components:Title Self explanatory.
Authors Self explanatory.
Abstract The abstract gives an overview of the entire work. It should state the purpose or central question of the project, state why it is important, give a brief statement of what was done, a brief statement of what was found, and a brief statement of what was concluded. It should be understandable without the reader needing to read the entire report. One good structure is to have five sentences, covering the following:
Introduction The introduction covers the motivation, nature, and scope of the report. It also introduces the approach in broad terms, gives a broad overview of the results, and outlines key conclusions. It should include discussion of pertinent literature to help readers understand these elements. (How is your research similar to and different from other research in motivation, nature, scope, results, etc.?)
Note that the introduction only introduces related work, your approach, your results, and your conclusions. You should cover these topics in greater depth later in your report.
Approach/Methods
Results You need to summarize results from testing your software in your report. These should be thorough, so that your readers can analyze them and come to their own conclusions based on them. At the same time, these results should not be exhaustive. That is, they should not be the raw data but appropriate summaries of that data, such as means, standard deviations, and results of statistical hypothesis tests run on the data. Tables and graphs are often appropriate ways to present summarized data but other summaries, such as text descriptions, may also be appropriate. Raw data may be included in an appendix.
Discussion You need to discuss the results you have found. This includes comparing your data sets to one another and commenting on likely reasons for similarities and differences found.
Conclusions You need to decide what is reasonable to conclude from your results and clearly state all such conclusions and the bases on which they rest.
Future Work You need to suggest appropriate ways that your work could be built upon (by you or others). This could be anything from more experiments to help validate the conclusions to radical changes in approach.
Bibliography You need to present a full set of citations for all works cited in your report. Do not include other related work that is not discussed in your report.
Appendices If there is important information that you would like to include in your report that would impede the normal flow of the report if included elsewhere, it may be included in one or more appendices. In particular, your full source code, ROS launch and world files, and ROS launch and world file documentation (as described for Project 1), should be included as appendices. You should also include an appendix that lists the contributions of each team member to each part of this project (design, implementation, testing, and reporting).
Note that while all of the components above must be included in your report, they do not necessarily need to be organized into sections this same way. For example, if your approach combines ideas from multiple prior approaches, you might describe the approach in a single section with multiple subsections or, alternately, in multiple sections. As a second example, you might choose to combine your discussion and conclusions into one section or to combine your conclusions and future work into one section. However, deviations from the expected order and division of the document should be justifiable, not gratuitous.
You should submit an electronic copy of your report through Canvas.
Draft Report Due: 11:59 pm, Monday, 22 November 2021.
Final Report Due: 11:59 pm, Wednesday, 8 December 2021.
Your demonstration will take place sometime during the week of December 6 through 10. Please work with me to determine your demonstration time.
When requesting a demonstration time, please indicate whether you wish to have one demonstration or two and please give at least two alternatives for each demonstration requested. I will try to honor all requests but if there are scheduling conflicts between teams, I will resolve these in a first-come, first-served manner and the later requesting team may need to determine an alternate time for a demonstration.
Each team will submit a draft and final poster on their project. Both the draft and the final poster have the same required contents. The draft poster will be graded on a ✓+ / ✓ / ✓– (check-plus/check/check-minus) scheme only and is intended primarily to allow me to provide you with feedback that you can use to improve the quality of your final poster. The final poster will be point graded.
Your poster will be modeled on a technical poster that a researcher might present at a conference. As such, it will have the same components as the report. However, the poster is not meant to be a self-contained document like the report. Instead, like slides for a presentation, the poster is meant to be supporting material that you may refer to while explaining your work to people standing before you. As such, you will want to keep the words to a minimum, using phrases or bullet points rather than long paragraphs of text and include diagrams, graphs, and other figures that are difficult to convey through spoken words.
Draft Poster Due (electronic copy only): 11:59 pm, Friday, 3 December 2021.
Final Poster Due (both electronic and printed copy): 10:59 am, Friday, 10 December 2021 (tentative).
This project will be graded as follows:
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Appropriateness of Software for Mission Original Contributions to Robot Performance Software Quality Status Report Written Report Poster Code Adoption TOTAL |
25 150 100 15 150 50 100 (bonus) 500 (+100 bonus) |
"Original Contributions to Robot Performance" will be based on a combination of how well the robot performs the mission during your team’s demonstration period and how much of that performance is deemed to be the result of your own contributions to the software. That is, because you are allowed to use freely available code and encouraged to share your code with others, it would be possible for a team to simply copy another team’s high performing software in its entirety and likewise have a high performing robot. However, because the copying team’s contribution to that software would be deemed to be zero, the copying team would receive zero points for "Original Contributions to Robot Performance." Similarly, a team that created all of its own code but the resulting code failed to make the robot perform any part of the mission would also receive zero points for "Original Contributions to Robot Performance." On the other hand, a team that built on the code of others by substantially adding to and/or revising that code in ways that significantly improve robot performance could receive up to the maximum points available in this category.
Robot performance itself will be based on whether the robot's performance is effective, efficient, consistent, reliable, and deft, and whether the robot demonstrates apparent intelligence.
"Software Quality" will be based not on the demonstration but on careful review of the code itself, looking for code that is well organized following object-oriented principles, well documented internally (including naming and commenting), elegant, refined, and straightforward.
"Status Report," "Written Report," and "Poster" will be graded based on the descriptions of these items given above.
"Code Adoption" will be based on how much of your software is used by other teams and how significantly it aids in the performance of their software. This portion of the grade is to encourage you to think of project ideas that could substantially help with important aspects of the mission and to work in an open and inviting way with your classmates to keep them informed of your work and help them to understand and make use of it.
You may write your program from scratch or may start from programs for which the source code is freely available (such as on the web or from friends or student organizations). If you do not start from scratch, you must give a complete and accurate accounting of where all of your code came from and indicate which parts are original or changed, and which you got from which other source. Similarly, for the written components of this assignment you may follow the format or content of other written works but you must give a complete and accurate accounting of who deserves credit for all parts of your documents. Failure to give credit where credit is due is academic fraud and will be dealt with accordingly. Please see OU’s academic integrity website.
You may use whatever computing resources you have access to for the development and testing of your world and launch files and your control code. However, your control code must launch and run successfully on the OU TurtleBots by following the instructions you provide on doing so.