NOTE: The hardcopies of the parts of this assignment are due at the beginning of the class period, with the exception of the final poster which is due by 1:30 on the due date. This means that if you are even a minute late, you lose 20%. If you are worried about potentially being late, turn in your assignments ahead of time. Do this by submitting them to me during office hours or by sliding them under my office door. For the final poster, bring it to the Devon Hall Atrium between 12:30 and 1:30 on the due date and ensure that it is mounted and ready for presentation by 1:30. Electronic copies are due by 5:00 pm on the due date, with the exception of the final poster which is due by noon on the due date. Submit them through D2L before the time they are due. Do not send assignments to me through email or leave them in my departmental mail box.
A primary reason to build intelligent robots is to accomplish missions. For this project, the mission is simple and unimportant but it is related to more complex and important missions, as detailed below. The key is to give you experience designing, implementing, testing, and reporting on robot software to carry out missions.
The goals of this assignment are:
You will design, implement, test, and report on robot software to control one of the OU Turtlebots as it carries out the mission of locating and turning off a (physical simulation of a) whistling tea pot. This scenario is similar to the one described in Homework 1. This mission was invented as a safe analogue of the DARPA Robotics Challenge mission of finding and turning off a valve near a leaking (steam) pipe as part of a disaster response scenario.
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.
Author 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 double space this document, so that I have room to write comments/corrections on it. To conserve paper, you should print all of your documents for this class on both sides of each sheet of paper when practical and should make an extra effort to do so with this large document.
You should submit an electronic copy of your report before class through D2L and turn in a printed copy at the start of class.
Draft Report Due: Tuesday, November 27.
Final Report Due: Thursday, December 6.
Each team will give a demonstration of their robot software on an OU Turtlebot sometime during the week of December 3 through December 6. Each demonstration period will be half an hour long, which includes up to 10 minutes of setup and 20 minutes for the robot to locate and turn off the tea pot. Teams must schedule at least one demonstration and may schedule two. If a team chooses to give two demonstrations, the greater performance of the two will be used to score robot performance. Available times for demonstrations are:
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): Thursday, November 29.
Poster Registration Due (using the CS Poster Session wiki): Friday, November 30 by noon. Note that you need to be registered with the wiki before you can register your poster. Since wiki registration requires manual approval, you should register with the wiki well in advance of this due date.
Final Poster Due (both electronic and printed copy): Friday, December 7.
This project will be graded as follows:
|
|
|
|
Software Quality Status Report Written Report Poster Code Adoption |
20 5 30 15 20 (bonus) |
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 compile on the OU Turtlebots using
g++ or make (if you provide a make file) and must
launch and run successfully on those machines by following the instructions
you provide on doing so.