Projects must be done in group (Min. 4 and Max. 10 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 4 to 10 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.

Team registration due date is Thursday February 21. To register, please fill in the registration form before Thursday February 21 and submit it to MCTR1002@gmail.com. Project registration directions are available here. To check the registration status, click here.

2012-2013 Course Project

This year course project will be about humanitarian demining. In this project each participating team will construct a teleoperated or an autonomous robot that should be able to search for underground and aboveground anti-personnel mines and produce a map of the detected mines. The robot has to be able to navigate through rough terrain that mimics a real minefield. Project demos will take place at the GUC humanitarian demining arena (close to the PV station) during the revision week. Only best three teams will participate in the Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-Free World, the first outdoor robotic competition aimed at fostering robotics research and its applications in the area of humanitarian demining in the world. Minesweepers will be organized by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Egypt chapter and sponsored and hosted by the German University in Cairo (GUC). For more information and competition rule, see: http://www.landminefree.org/

Project Report:

The project 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 humanitarian demining problem. Explain what the problem was or challenge that you were given focusing on the problem of landmine in Egypt? 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 different approaches proposed and reported in the literature to solve the problem of humanitarian demining. Summarize pros and cons of similar systems and explain how your system extends or differs from these systems.

4. Proposed Systems: Explain in details all the mechanical, electrical, electronic and software components and the hardware and software integration of the developed system.

5. Performance Evaluation: Establish a set of evaluation metrics such as true detection rate, false detection rate, etc. and run some experiments to quantitatively and 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.

Project CD:

Before the presentation and in order to complete evaluating the project, each team has to prepare a CD for the supervisor containing all materials related to the project (complete documentation report according to the course policy mentioned above + a well documented source code and executable code with UserGuide that shows how to install and use the developed software + all the software packages used during the project development if any).

Project Grade:

The project weight is 20% of the total course grade. The project grade will be calculated in a trial version of the Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-Free World robotic competition as follows:
- 8% Navigation and Detection
- 12% Localization and Mapping
 

Unmanned Vehicles Poster [1% Bonus- Optional]:

Unmanned vehicles are teleoperated or autonomous robots that operate without an onboard human presence. Unmanned vehicles include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Climbing robots are also considered as unmanned vehicles. UXVs can be used in many pertinent areas of industrial and commercial importance such as search and rescue, security and surveillance, humanitarian demining, environment monitoring, pipeline monitoring, infrastructure health monitoring and glass-facades and solar panels cleaning. Additional bonus will be given to if the team prepares and submits a medium indoor color educational poster (Hardcopy) with dimensions approximately 80x60cm that shows different types of UGVs, UAVs, UUVs, USVs or climbing vehicles and their applications. This poster should be illustrative and should contain the following:

• Title: telling others the title of the chosen category (UGVs, UAVs, UUVs, USVs or climbing vehicles), the people involved in the work and their affiliation and course information (code, title and instructor). Example of the title would be; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Types and Applications
• What is UGVs, UAVs, UUVs, USVs or climbing vehicles? showing the definition of the chosen category.
• Types: show the different types of the chosen category.
• Applications: section that shows the different civilian and military applications of the chosen category.
• References: a list of the used references

You MUST get an approval from the course instructor BEFORE printing the poster. Otherwise, the poster will NOT be accepted.