This afternoon, we'll open the robotics lab (17-510), at 4pm so that you have extra time to prepare the demo.
This is for Wednesday groups ONLY. We will do the same for Thursday
groups tomorrow.
The final report is due at the end of week 11 (Sunday 11:59:59pm). Please follow this template when writing the report. Remember that this is your individual report, so it's important to tell us about your individual contribution. Submission details are given in the Stage 2 project description .
This Tuesday 2-4pm, we'll have a lab session in the Robotics lab in Ainsworth J17-510. Willis 212 will be occupied by another class, so you'll have to bring your robot from Willis up to level 5 of Ainsworth.
The maze will be setup on the RoboCup field. You must take your shoes off to protect the carpet. Also please note that your robot will behave a little differently on carpet versus the smooth concrete floor, so some parameters, especially associated with turning, may have to be changed.
The Robotic lab is occupied by PhD students, so please keep the noise down and we cannot have too many groups in the lab at once, so we may have to schedule times when you have access to the field.
Two Ethernet to USB-C adapters have gone missing. If you know their whereabouts, please return them to the lab. Other students depend on these, so they must not be removed from the router cables.
You can get some extra lab time during the Tuesday lecture time (2-4pm). If Willis 212 lab is free, we can use that. If there is another class in there, we'll setup in the robotics lab in Ainsworth Level 5J17-510.
You can find your individual report marks for assignment 1 by entering the following command in VLAB or a CSE computer:
3431 classrun -collect Report1
If you have any questions about your report, please talk to your tutors.
We will not have lectures this week, but please make sure you come to the labs and get started on the second stage of the project. You'll need to time to finish it. Look back to the week 6 lab nots to get started, as well as this weeks.
As announced in the lectures last week, we'll open the labs this week so you can get started on the second phase of the project. The week 6 lab notes tell you how to get started. There will be minimal supervision this week. If your group does plan to come in, please email cs3431@cse.unsw.edu.au so we know how many groups we should expect.
The give system was down for some time, but it is up again now and the report submission is now enabled.
You can submit via WebCMS (go to the
submission
tab for assignment 1) or you can use the give command in VLAB:
give cs3431 Report1 file.pdf
The deadline has been extended to Sunday 23:59:59.
For those who did not attend the lecture today, here is the marking scheme for the demos. Total mark is our of ten. You will start with 10/10 and marks will be deducted if, e.g. the path is very jerky or the map is inaccurate, etc.
Please note that you do not have to recognise that the robot is back at the start, as long as it can get there by wall following. Also you do not have to publish the path and transforms. Cartographer does that already.
|
Component |
Quality |
Notes |
|
Map |
2 |
Deduct marks for tearing or inaccurate map |
|
Path |
3 |
Is the path smooth? Is the exploration strategy reasonably efficient?
|
|
Navigate to Start |
2 |
Did the robot make it back to the start? |
|
Full Autonomy |
2 |
Deduct marks for manual interference,
|
|
Speed |
1 |
Was the robot too slow? |
|
Total |
10 |
There will be an extra lab session on Monday evening (5-8pm) to give some extra time to complete the assignment. When you arrive, you will allocated a time slot to run the robot so that we don't overload the network.
Because the Friday labs were undersubscribed, we are cancelling them. Students who nominated those labs are now distributed amongst the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday labs. If you have not found a group yet, please contact the lecturer or one of the tutors.
If anyone is interested in doing a project with the RoboCup@Home team, they are meeting today at 2:30pm in J17-504B (inside the design studio), and the SPL team (soccer robots) are meeting at 4pm today, also in the design studio.
If you chose to do this, you will still start working on the TurtleBots, to become familiar with ROS 2, before moving to the other robots.
The wall follower code template that you can use as a starting point for stage 1 of the project can be found here .
Instructions on how to build and run the sample code are also there. Remember that this code only drives the robot forward and turns when it encounters an obstacle. You have to modify the code to turn it into a wall follower.
Lecture recordings are available through Echo360 on Moodle. This is the only thing we will use Moodle for.
The recording of this week's lecture is up, but you can't hear me very well because the room is small enough that I didn't need the microphone. I'll will use it in the future, so the recordings can be heard. However, I still want everyone to come to the lectures in -person. The recordings should only be needed for revision or if you have to miss a class.
The course outline should also be visible on WebCMS now.
Welcome to Robot Software Architectures. Both lectures and labs start this week.
The lectures are in the Old Main Building (G31) and the labs are in the J18-212, the Mechanical Engineering Willis Annex. This week's lab should be short. We'll ask you to form groups of around 5 students to work on the term-long project and we'll get you started on the online ROS 2 tutorials. Next week will be your first introduction to the TurtleBot3 robots you'll be using.
Please note that this course is in-person . We expect you to come to the lectures, and attending labs is mandatory. The labs are where you'll learn the most and be able interact with your team mates and ask questions of me and the tutors.
There is a forum for you to have discussions amongst yourselves but we will not be monitoring it closely as we prefer to answer questions in the labs. It's much easier and quicker to explain things face-to-face with the robot in front of us than to talk via the forum. So please do not expect rapid responses to forum posts. Talk to us in the lectures and labs.