Look a little deeper at how its done
Logistics
- Delay “hello robot” to Sunday, ok?
- Please note how to submit team homework
- Quiz is coming on March 29
Working In Teams
- In all my courses I ask students to work on projects in teams.
- I have seen them succeed and have seen them struggle.
- These notes are based on this hard won experience with student run teams.
- What kinds of ideas or approaches have you used (or been used on you) that you think are good?
- Lets hear some horror stories?
Establishing Norms / Social Contract
NB You're not trying to become best friends with your teammates. You're trying to get something done!
- A key challenge is to establish the “norms” or the “culture” of your team.
- What I mean by that is the unspoken or spoken etiquette or understandings.
- For example, how often you meet, how much you care about being punctual, how you give each other feedback, how you deal with conflict.
- Each team, even of just four people, might handle things a little differently.
- A college course, which runs only 13 weeks, this there’s not a whole lot of time for these things to happen organically.
- This means that everyone needs to pitch in a little extra to it a fun and useful experience for everyone.
Time to meet
- One of the big challenges is to find time to meet, so try to be flexible.
- As a team, choose a fixed time and place to meet every week. Be flexible.
- Your first meeting is very important.
Personal Goals
- Each member honestly say what your personal goals are for this course
- This course is my most important, I really care and will do anything to be successful
- Or, I have a heavy course load, I will do what I can but I have to balance
- Or, I am perfectly happy with a “B”, don’t expect intensity from me.
- If everyone knows each other’s perspective this will set expectations
- Each member of the team is responsible for their own work and for the wellbeing of the team
Decisions
- Talk about how you will make decisions
- Democratic vote
- Decide or chose a leader to have final say
- Divide up the domain (front end/back end/ etc) and assign it to people.
- Be sensitive to everyone’s particular constraints
Be kind to each other
- My belief is that every single person on the team is doing their best given their own situation.
- If it seems like someone is not doing their best, or somehow being counterproductive
- Try to figure out their situation or ask them.
- Once you understand the context things often make sense and you can leave any anger or resentment behind.
Commitment and enthusiasm
- Keep each other to a high standard
- Be enthusiastic and committed
- If one person didn’t hold their end up this week, don’t let that discourage you or lead you to not hold up your end next week.
Path Planning
- For now, just focus on a mobile robot like a car
- Goal of path planning: get the robot from where it is to a destination
- Beyond that there are many variations
- What kind of map is present?
- Are the obstacles encountered known ahead of time, and can they move?
Types of maps - Graphs
- Define places where Robot can be (nodes)
- Define which ones are connected (edges)
- Edge information includes
- What path to take
- What the “cost” would be of taking that path (surface, distance, desirability)
- Planning the route becomes a graph searching problem
- Find the “cheapest” path between two nodes
Types of maps - Occupancy Grids
- Divide the “area” into a regular grid
- Indicate whether each “cell” in a grid is occupied or free
- Occupancy Grids can be multi-layer
- For example to indicate
- access for different types of vehicles
- areas that are free but discouraged
- Treat each cell in the grid as a
nodewith 4 or 8 edges
(random Image from picsum.photos)