Mct/ROB/200 Robotics

Projects can be done individually but preferably in group of maximum 4 students. Teamwork helps to achieve more than what could ever be achieved on your own, improve problem solving, foster creativity and innovation and improve decision making. Teams of students must conceive, design and develop the chosen project. Different issues should be considered to form a collaborative team such as responsibility for assignment, the optimal team size (from 1 to 4 students), team composition (hard and soft skills, previous academic performance, gender, ethnicity, etc.) and the schedule of the team members (how easy to establish regular face-to-face meetings). Once team is formed, students should be willing to subordinate their personal preferences to the decisions of the team, and be willing to compromise in order to achieve a group consensus. As team work should have team rewards, team members will receive a common grade. However a free-riding team member will be penalized if a common and repetitive negative feedback (peer evaluations) received from the other team members. This feedback will be investigated before deciding the penalty. "Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress and working together is success", Henry Ford (1863-1947), founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines.

The following options are available:

Type A: System Design and Implementation

Students identify a problem in a pertinent area of academic, industrial or commercial importance for which there are no available system with reasonable cost and capabilities. This system must contain a combination of mechanical, electronic, computer and control components integrated together in order to solve the problem at hand.
Design and develop a new robotic system to solve this problem.
Analyze experimentally the performance of the developed system.

Type B: Empirical Evaluation

In this type of projects, student will pick a problem that interests him/her.
Student is supposed to search the literature for approaches to tackle this problem, identifies strong and weak points of each approach and selects the most appropriate appraoch.
He/she must implement and experiment with the selected technique to quantitatively evaluate its performance in tackling the problem.

Type C: Algorithm Design

Student identifies a problem for which there are no satisfying approaches.
Develop a new technique to tackle this problem.
Analyze theoretically and/or empirically the performance of his/her technique.

Project Activities:

ID	Task Description
1	Activity 1: Problem Characterization This project will start by studying comprehensively the problem in order to characterize its complexity and its main challenges. A Statement of work (SOW) report will be produced for the problem characterization .
2	Activity 2: Literature Survey An exhaustive literature review will be performed on the modern approaches, which are currently being used or investigated to solve this problem. This literature review will address all the aspects of the academically or commercially available approaches. This literature review will provide taxonomy of the different problems and an analysis and comparison of the most interesting solutions. A report that summarizes the literature review will be produced. This report will also provide answers on the following questions: - How do the different approaches differ? - What are the strong and weak points of each approach? - How can you decide which is appropriate for your application?
3	Activity 3: Comprehensive Study of the Candidate Approach Perform a comprehensive study to fully understand the candidate approach.
4	Activity 4: Proposed Solution Design Based on the problem considered and the literature survey, propose your own approach to solve the problem. Interim report will be produced describing in details the proposed approach and explaining how this approach extends or differs from other approached reported in the literature.
5	Activity 5: Metrics selection/definition Select and define a set of measures of performance, which can be used to evaluate the proposed approach.
6	Activity 6: Implementation Implement the proposed solution to test and evaluate its performance.
7	Activity 7: Performance Evaluation and Refinement Run some experiments to quantitatively and/or qualitatively assess the performance of the proposed approach. You must assess the quality of work as well as its fit with project objectives and refine the system if needed. A report on the implementation, test, and performance evaluation of the proposed approach will be produced.
8	Activity 8: Final Report Prepare and submit the final report. The final report must contain the following sections: 1. Summary: The Summary should be a brief version of the full report. It should give the reader an accurate overview. Be brief, but be specific. 2. Introduction: summarize the importance of the problem you are trying to solve and the reason that motivated you to select this project. Explain what was the problem or challenge that you were given? state the purpose of the project and how did you solve it? Enumerate the objectives of the project and describe in brief the structure of the report. 3. Literature Review: Conduct a critical survey on similar systems/algorithms and explain how your system/algorithm extends or differs from these systems/algorithms. 4. Proposed Systems: Explain in details all the components of the developed system/algorithm. 5. Performance Evaluation: Establish a set of evaluation metrics and run some experiments to quantitatively and/or qualitatively assess the performance of the developed system. Students must assess the quality of work as well as its fit with project objectives. 6. Conclusions & Recommendations: summarize the conclusion and future improvement. Explain how did you solve the problem, what problems were met? what did the results show? And how to refine the proposed solution?You may organize ideas using lists or numbered points, if appropriate, but avoid making your report into a check-list or a series of encrypted notes 7. References: Every report needs references; in fact, your failure to consult references for guidance may be considered negligence. On the other hand, when you include sentences, photos, drawings or figures from other sources in your report, the complete reference must be cited. Failure to do so is plagiarism, an academic infraction with serious consequences.
9	Activity 9: Presentation Final Delivery Before the presentation and in order to complete evaluating the project, you have to prepare a CD for the supervisor containing all materials related to your thesis. The contents of this CD must be organized in the following folders: - Documents: a folder that includes the thesis report with JabRef eRecords of the research resources, and sources of the used diagrams (Visio, PPT, Enterprise, etc.) and the presentation (PDF or PPT with all Latex source and videos/demos if any). - Source Code: a folder contains a well documented source code and executable code with UserGuide that shows how to install and use the developed software. - SW Used: a folder includes all the software packages used during the thesis development. - Papers: All the published/submitted papers (if any, both PDF and Word/Latex with all images/diagrams and slides used) organized in folders named by the title of the conference/journal. - Reading: All the reading materials used during the thesis development.

Project Presentations:

The project team presents the developed project in 10 minutes plus 5 minutes for a question period. The classmates view the presentation, review the presented material, and ask questions. Each presentation is attended by the course instructor as chair, course TA, critiquers (classmates), and the project team. All project proposals must be submitted to the course instructor before the proposal presentation. The teams do not need to submit their presentation material for marking. However, students are encouraged to submit their electronic presentation materials for archival. During the presentation, one or two members can do all of the speaking, or three or four members can share the speaking equally. All team members must be on the stage. Absent members need to provide documentation excusing their participation, e.g., a doctor's note. The course instructors will provide the critiquers with hardcopies of the evaluation sheet. The critiquers mark these sheets up and hand the completed sheets to the presenting team at the end of the presentation. The critiquers should provide clear, relevant and professional comments. The critquers comments do not need to agree with the instructors' comments, but must be well justified. Marks are assigned solely by the course instructors based on the presentation. The instructors use the same evaluation sheet as the other reviewers. The classmates' critique questions and results do not affect the presentation marks directly, but may help the instructors to clarify their own rationale, especially in evaluating the team's responses to questions.