Assignments

There will be three types of assignments in this course:

Written Assignments

• Written assignment 1, due April 26, 2004
• Written assignment 2, due May 10, 2004

The Warm-Up Project Assignment

The goal of the warm-up project assignment is to provide you with the opportunity to familiarize yourself with robot data and (optionally) the robot hardware, to the extent necessary for the research project.

You are given data sets of robot sensor and motion data, along with a map of a building. You task will be to implement a probabilistic localization algorithm of your choice that enables you to localize the robot relative to the map. The starting position of the robot is unknown; thus, you have to solve a global localization problem. We will test your software using new robot data, not available to you during software develoment.

Optionally, you are encouraged to implement your localization algorithm on a physical robot, so that we can all enjoy watching your robot localize itself in an office building (a map will be provided).

Research Project

You have to propose a small research project using robot data and, optionally, physical robots. The research project has to involve an implementation using real-world data, and a statistical algorithm that should be a variant of the algorithms covered in class. To successfully pass this requirement, you have to submit a written proposal for approval by the instructor. You also have to submit a final project report, which has to address (1) the problem you solved, (2) the statistical technique including its mathematical derivation, and (3) experimental results you obtained using your approach. Ideally, the project covers interesting new ground and might be the basis for a future conference paper submission. Consult with the instructor for identifying interesting and doable research projects.