Project

10% Proposal — Mon Feb 08
10% Demonstration — Week of Mar 29 (or earlier if ready)
15% Report — Thu Apr 01 (or earlier if ready)

Undergraduate students: Projects may be done in groups of up to two. An ideal project will involve both interesting theoretical development as well as a practical implementation. Most projects involve using the CRS robotic arm or the Pioneer mobile platform to perform an interesting task. Pictures of previous projects can be found here and here.

Graduate students: Projects must be done individually. The project should go beyond the scope of the lecture material (for example, you might implement and validate or use an algorithm from a research paper). The proposal, demonstration, and report might vary from the descriptions below depending on the nature of the project.

Proposal

The project proposal should be a short (no more than 4 double-spaced pages) report that describes the scope of your project. You should describe the problem you are trying to solve, the methods you plan on using, the difficulties you might encounter, any preliminary progress you have made towards finishing your project, and a project schedule (perhaps in the form of a Gantt chart). If your project involves constructing additional hardware, you should include a budget, an itemized list of parts, and sources (and ideally prices) for the parts.

Demonstration

Each project will receive up to 15 minutes for a presentation and demonstration to the class. Your presentation should have an introduction, a description of the project, solutions to some of the difficult technical problems, what to expect from the demo and conclusions. For a ten minute presentation most people need between 4 and 10 slides.

Report

A final report (no more than 20 double-spaced pages) that describes your project, the problems you needed to solve and how you solved them (you could structure the report using headings like Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Conclusions and Future Work). Make sure to document any sources that you used (books, conference or journal articles, external source code). If there were any unsolved problems, you should describe them and explain why they could not be solved. DO NOT include source code in the report; you should submit your source code electronicall in a zipped archive.