SimLab - Project Proposal and Final Presentation

Project Proposal

Please send your project proposal as pdf by email. Try to use LaTeX. Brief 2 pages are enough.

Please prepare a proposal with the following sections:

  • Objective (“what”, about 1/2 page): Describe in detail the behavior you want so see on the robot. This section must not make any statements on what method you are using to create this behavior. E.g., saying “using Reinforcement Learning …” is not a goal description. Only describe the behavior we can eventually see on the robot, as detailed as possible.

  • Workplan (“how”, about 1 page): Describe how the goal can be achieved. The workplan should be organized in small work packages (or steps). In particular the first steps should be very clear and realistic. In each step, describe what you intend to achieve, e.g. demonstration of a simplified behavior, and what methods you plan to use to achieve the sub-goal. For each step, try to estimate the work effort in terms of time. If you work in a team, mention if you split up work packages.

Presentation Details

Here are for the final presentation:

  • Each presentation is max 25 minutes in total.

  • Each presentation includes two parts:

    • A spotlight presentation with video and discussion (15 mins)

    • A live demo during the virtual session (10 mins max) (In the offline course, this would be an interactive demo on the robot.)

  • In the spotlight presentation you should explain very briefly the goal (“what”), briefly the core problems and methods (“how”), and the rough system structure (on the software level). For this:

    • Prepare minimalistic, simple bullet point slides (make no efforts here, no figures), only to help you talking to us. Copy from your project proposal. Maybe around 2-3 slides.

    • But prepare a fancy video! This video is what persists from your project for later generations. Make an effort here. See details below. You may want to start with the video, and use the bullet point slides to give more explanations; or switch between them.

    • If there were no interruptions, the total spotlight should be just 5-8 minutes. But questions and discussions will make it 15.

  • In the demo, run the code live on your computer, perhaps show code or play with parameters.

The video should have:

  • A proper title slide

  • Some clips (possibly accelerated, like “x5”) cut together

  • Ideally with text/captions explaining things

  • In total perhaps 2 minutes.

Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qymi-qon9M

Preparing a video can be a lot of work. Don’t sink too much time in it, but try to generate something that could be submitted to a conference. Most Linux/Ubuntu video editing tools are super bad. DaVinci Resolve is good, but might crash on Linux. Kdenlive is kind of ok.