Computer Science 154
Short assignment 2
Due Monday., Feb.
3 in class
Name(s) __________________________
Reading for Week 2: Three-layer Architectures
by Erann Gat. Click
here for the paper (pdf).
- 1. First page of Lab Project #1
For each lab project, there is a (minimum) requirement of one page and one image
per week of write-up on your progress. More than one text page and one image is welcome,
but keep in mind the following, borrowed from Erann Gat's quote collection:
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
Of course, furious activity might lead to understanding -- in which case
it would be considered a good thing. But it is a also good idea to step back
and reflect on a project even while you're working on it, which is part of
the reason why the first page of the project write-up is due at the start
of next week.
The following is a rough, general guide to putting together a technical
report on a robotics project, e.g., for submission to a conference. Particular
projects may omit some of these points and include others.
- Introduction
- What problem are you addressing?
- What are the primary objectives of your work?
- How does this project relate to previous work? (cite)
- Why is this project new, interesting, and/or important?
- Background
- What makes this problem difficult?
- What have others done or what are various possible approaches? (cite)
- Motivate the features of the problem that your
solution will focus on.
- In what ways are you limiting the scope of the problem
to make it more tractable?
- Include any background equations or less-formal
relationships here, or anything else a reader might need
to be reminded of.
- Approach
- What were the key design decisions you made?
- Why did you choose your approach over other possible approaches?
- What were the difficulties your approach entailed?
- How did you get around them?
- Diagrams are often excellent summaries.
- Progress and Performance Results
- Provide images and/or data, along with descriptions and
explanations of them.
- When constructing systems or processing data, before-and-after
pictures of the robot (or raw/processed data) are often
excellent summaries of progress.
- Perspective
- How well did your system perform?
- What were some of the key factors in its success or failure?
- What could be done to improve your system?
- What other interesting problems or areas of investigation
does this project and its results suggest?
For this week, you should provide the URL of a publicly viewable web page
with one (or more) pages of text and one (or more) images of your system.
You should provide initial versions of at least the
Introduction, Approach, and
Progress
sections in this first week. Since
you only need to create one page for this week, these sections need not
be very long.
However, they will give both you and me a sense of the project's progress.
You may include the URL here or email it to me.
- 2. Robot (??) architecture
Describe two human tasks (or invent your own scenarios) such that, for the first, a person would act in a manner analogous to Rodney Brooks's subsumption-based behavioral control. The second task should be one in which a person would act in a way resembling Ronald Arkin's motor-schema control strategy. Creativity is welcome... .