Coursework 1: Wall Following with a LEGO Robot

Joanna J. Bryson

February 16, 2012

1 Introduction

All of your courseworks are designed primarily to give you experience in developing intelligent control and/or cognitive systems. However, the course is also intended to give you experience and feedback in writing about research. To this end, you will be writing research reports of about two pages, using exactly this format. Submissions should be in PDF or HTML, preferably derived from this latex format, certainly in 12 point font. I recommend making HTML by using latex plus htlatex, but you can construct your report using any tool you please. Note that this specification is a bit over 1.5 pages long, so your HTML report no more than 33% longer than this. Figures (both drawn plans and photos) are encouraged for marks and clarity and do not count either for or against page length. The 1–2 pages are counting text only. But remember, don’t spend too much time on this coursework! You should spend about 19 hours total on each coursework, about 4 of which will be writing up.

The Introduction should give a brief description of what you have done, and also give some idea about why you have done it. I expect you to cite a paper or two for the research context. For coursework 1, one of the papers you should probably cite is Brooks (1991), since you have been asked to take a fairly reactive approach to developing robot intelligence.

2 Approach

The approach describes in detail exactly what you have done. This should ideally include some experiments you set up, for example to determine in what conditions you could get better results from the robot. The approach should be in sufficient detail that another person could replicate your experiments. You may cite other papers here too if you are taking an approach from another paper, or modifying it only slightly.

Courswork one is to construct a robot capable of circumnavigating rooms or other closed spaces (don’t worry about doorways – just close or block them.) Ideally this should work in “natural” (unaltered) indoor environments with a variety of obstacles along the walls. To quantify the outcomes of this coursework, you may want to think about questions such as contrasting adding extra control algorithms vs. changing the physical shape of the robot for increasing circuit time for the robot, or trying different target sonar readings for maintaining a particular distance from the wall in a variety of contexts. For coursework one it is quite likely that you will not have initially thought of a hypothesis to test, but will rather just have tried to make the robot work. However, in your exploration (both with the robot and with the reading) if you do find something that seems to make a difference, you should go try to capture what that something is. Can you describe it exactly? Can you replicate it with different robot configurations? Can you quantify how much improvement you get given how much change to some parameter on the robot? Don’t forget to consider things such as the state of battery charge or whether you are operating in daylight or in proximity to other sonar-using robots as possible explanations for strange behaviour.

Please do mention who shared your robot in the approach section, and the extent to which you worked together. The objective here is to learn. How much you work together is totally up to you so long as you each write your report independently.

3 Results

The results section describes the outcomes. This should be purely factual descriptions, including qualitative outcomes, quantitative outcomes and possibly statistics. For example, you could report the average speed around a circuit in two conditions plus standard deviations and a significance test to tell whether you have evidence that the conditions lead to different results. For coursework 1, this must include video.

With respect to your own results, if you describe a reasonably-well working system in a comprehensible manner you will pass. If you competently fill in all of these sections as described in this specification, you will get at least 55. Getting a mark over 70 requires demonstrating insight, creativity and / or understanding that goes beyond the basics laid out for you in this document. For example, an insightful comment about one or more cited papers supported by evidence from your experience might get you these extra marks. So might a particularly accurate and replicable account of your approach and results.

4 Discussion

The discussion is the most discursive part of your paper, it may include speculation. You should discuss the extent to which your results addressed the questions described in your introduction, and what the results imply about your own work and work more broadly. You might suggest other experimental protocols that could have given different results and lessons learned.

5 Conclusion

The conclusion is just one paragraph. After possible digressions in the discussion, you should come back to state exactly what you tried to do (brief summary of the introduction), what the outcome was (brief summary of the results), and what you can certainly state as a result of this (the implications of the results in light of the introduction.)

References

    Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence, 47(1–3):139–159.