Course syllabus

Course-PM

TME290 Autonomous robots lp4 vt19 (7.5 hp)

Course is offered by the department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences

Contact details

Please contact the course staff for any further questions about the teaching or course subjects. If a meeting is required, please make contact by email to request an appointment (during office hours).

Examiner and lecturer

Ola Benderius, 031-772 2086, ola.benderius@chalmers.se

Course assistants

Luca Caltagirone, luca.caltagirone@chalmers.se
Responsible for lab work and robot hardware.

Yushu Yu, yushu.yu@chalmers.se
Responsible for parts of home problems and the correction of these.

Study administrator

Sonja Laakso-Gustafsson, 031-772 3637, sonja.laakso@chalmers.se

Course purpose

The course aims at giving the students an understanding of design principles for autonomous systems, both robots and software agents, and also gives students the opportunity to apply their knowledge in practice through the construction of a simple autonomous robot.

Schedule

TimeEdit

Course literature

Lecture notes, scientific papers, and handouts. The material will be made available via the course web page.

Course design

The course consist of lectures, home problems, and a project. In the lectures the main theories of autonomous robots are covered, which will provide the students with a broad overview of the subject area. Furthermore, the students are expected to apply the knowledge from the lectures in the project and in the home problems.

The project part of the course consist of lab sessions with supervision by teachers, targeting final robot demonstration as a goal, including several sub-goals. The students are expected to carry out some project work outside class hours. The projects should be carried out in teams of three students per group.

Moreover, there are two sets of home problems that has to be carried out individually by each student. Both the project part and the individual homework part contribute to the student’s final grade on the course. Please see further details regarding assessment and grading below.

Lab sessions will take place in the Robotics lab located in the Mechanical Engineering building, and the time slots in the lab are bookable during the course.

Changes made since the last occasion

• The option of solving the project work in Python language was added
• The content of some lectures have been adjusted

Learning objectives and syllabus

• Describe properties of common types of robotic hardware, including sensors, actuators, and computational nodes
• Apply modern software development and deployment strategies connected with autonomous robots
• Set up and use equations of motion of wheeled autonomous robots
• Apply basic sensor fusion
• Set up and use computer simulations of autonomous robots
• Apply global and local navigation of autonomous robots
• Apply the basics of behavior-based robotics and evolutionary robotics
• Apply methods for decision making in autonomous robots
• Discuss the potential role of autonomous robots in society, including social, ethical, and legal aspects
• Discuss technical challenges with autonomous robots in society

Link to the syllabus on Studieportalen.

Study plan

Examination form

The examination consists of graded individual homework assignments and a graded project. Both the results on the individual homework part as well as the project group work results contribute to the student’s final grade on the course.

The students’ performance on the project will be evaluated and graded both on the group level and on the individual level, i.e. each group member will individually assess fellow team members’ contributions in the project by filling out a predefined form, in addition to the project assessment. If the contribution of an individual is found to be particularly strong or particularly weak, that will result in +1 or -1 in the final grade of that individual. Therefore, students of the same project group might end up with different project grades.

See the following subsections for details regarding assessment and grading. Refer also to the below section regarding plagiarism.

Grades

The grades that are given in this course are the following: 5, 4, 3, U (not passed).

Homework assessment

The homework consists of two separate problem sets, HP1 and HP2. A minimum grade of 3 is required on each Home problem set in order to pass the course. Furthermore, in order to get the highest grade on each of the Home problem sets, all submitted solutions must be flawless! Refer to the Home problem sheets for details regarding their individual grading.

Project assessment

For the project grade the total accomplishment of the project, as well as organization and structure, and final report contribute. In addition, the project teams must demonstrate their progress during the course by the accomplishment of some sub-goals.

The grading scheme for projects is as follows:

Grade 3: If the team has completed a working solution which has been demonstrated in the project demonstration arena.

Grade 4: Same as (3), and also showing the clear ambition to go beyond the most simple solutions, by comparing the performance of at least two different approaches and by clearly motivating the projects design choices in the final report.

Grade 5: Same as (3+4), and also an excellent ability to relate the design choices to the relevant scientific literature in the report.

In general, the written final report will be assessed according to the common standards of scientific and technical reporting. More specifically, the so called HISS-criteria 1 , which is an established scheme at Chalmers for assessment of student reports, will be applied as the foundation of the detailed assessment of the reports. The HISS-scheme encompasses the following four properties.

• Overall impression
• Content and understanding
• Structure
• Style and language

Individual team member assessment

Each team member will during the course individually assess fellow team members’ contributions in the project using a specific form, i.e. the Individual Team Member Assessment sheet. It occurs in connection with the Project report submission. The sheet include six dimensions:

• Contribution to team meetings
• Enable other individuals to contribute to team meetings
• Contribution outside of team meetings
• Show confidence in the other individuals’ abilities
• Show courtesy and respectfulness
• Respond to conflict in the team

Each student shall then submit the form, via email to the course examiner, before the specified deadline. Your answers will not be shared with anyone else! However, it is a delicate matter to do such judgements about other individuals, so please take on this responsibility with honesty and care.

The HISS-criteria: https://document.chalmers.se/download?docid=763034939 (only available in Swedish).

Final course grade

The student’s final course grade will be determined according to the following principles: Home problem 1, Home problem 2, and the Project accounts for 25%, 25%, and 50%, respectively, of the final grade. After summation, the final course grade will be determined by rounding it off to the nearest integer value.

In ambiguous cases, such as e.g. when the summation equals 4.5, the student’s overall performance in the course will also be taken into account. For example, it is more likely that the final grade will be a 5, in the above mentioned case, if the student has scored high in the individual tasks and the group grade was low, than in case of the opposite. In that latter case a final grade of 4 is more likely to occur.

Regarding plagiarism

Briefly, plagiarism occurs when someone present ideas, concepts, texts, or other structures from someone else, as their own. I.e. without appropriately acknowledging the original source. See further in the document about Academic integrity and honesty at Chalmers (link).

The reports (and other submitted materials such as e.g. programming code) should be original work in order to be passed. Therefore, all reports and texts that you submit for grading and examination must be submitted via Urkund, which is a tool for detection of plagiarism. Please see the assignment descriptions for details about how to submit your reports via Urkund. Note that all suspected cases of plagiarism (not only those detected by Urkund) will be reported to the university disciplinary committee (disciplinnämnden)!