Mobile Robotics Project

The project is meant to deal in depth with a subject of your choosing, possibly but not necessarily based on your bibliography assignment. It is due technically on the last day of classes, but the deadline is traditionally not strict so long as ample time is left for submitting your mark. This has been discussed in class.

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It is recommended (but not mandatory) that you prepare a web page explaining your project (akin to a combination of the proposal, introduction and conclusion in condensed form). This page will be made available to the rest of the class.

The key item that should be submitted and which will be evaluated is a term paper on the project.

All projects should be based on a paper from the research literature (a journal article) and in almost all cases should include an implementation. Exceptions to this format can be discussed in special cases.

The paper should include an introduction; a discussion of background and related work; a presentation of the method used, its basis, rational, function and assumptions; a section on experimental results; a conclusion including (important) a detailed critique of the method and an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. You should then provide some original thoughts regarding how the work could be improved, extended to fixed.

Due to scheduling problems in past years, the due dates for the project will have to observed scupulously!

Evaluation

• Good, coherent organization of the paper.
• A clear well written outline of the method, it's objectives, and the key advantages of the approach.
• The quality of the implementation, and/or analysis performed as part of the project.
• The quality of the experimental work, testing, or validation used to evaluate your results, conjectures or code.
• The critique of the method. MOST IMPORTANT.

In terms of the form of the paper, use a typical conference or journal paper as a model: introduction, background, approach, implementation issues, experimental data, discussion. Unlike a jourmnal paper, you might have rather more discussion of your implementation, but not too much more. While a demo is welcome, you should write the term paper as if it would be used "stand-alone" for evaluation purposes.

You implementation (code) should be attached as an appendix. Both source and executable should be submitted as email attachments, however it is not assured that they will be used for evaluation purposes (i.e. they should be considered as backup).

Note

If you do you work at home, be sure to backup your files (for example by sending duplicates to your school account).