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... .