We are glad to welcome you to DD2419 Project Course in Robotics and Autonomous Systems.

This course is an advanced course in computer science running over two periods and focusing on the broad, inter-disciplinary field of robotics. The emphasis in DD2419 is on showing how methods are used in practice and how they are integrated into a complete system. It follows up on the course DD2410, which gives a broad introduction to robotics. To keep things manageable and steer the learning in DD2419, the project task is predefined. So you will not be able to define your own project, but you will have loads of fun anyway! You will be working with a mobile robot equipped with an arm in the project.

This is a project course that uses actual hardware and we, therefore, need to limit the number of students. It is a robotics project course that makes use of ROS and where we apply robotics rather than learn the basics. The assumption is thus that you have taken a robotics course before and that you know ROS. At KTH this corresponds to having taken course DD2410. You will be admitted in competition with other students. If your coordinator or you yourself add you to the course without getting an approval from the person responsible for the course you will not be planned for when ordering hardware and you might not be able to take the course. Please contact the teacher of the course if you have questions about the admission.

Students need to be ready to invest a significant amount of time. The course is worth 9hp which corresponds to 6 weeks of full time studies (i.e. 240h) and we expect you to spend this amount of time, i.e. a lot more than on most other courses worth 9hp. To take the course you need to be willing to invest this time.

Many or maybe even most of you will find that you spend a much smaller part of your time on doing "real" work than you would have thought. Welcome to the real world! For some of you this "pain" will start with having to use your computer as the powerful tool it is and not just as a device for typing reports on. All of you will experience that there is a big step from idea to actually implemented, tested and working code that realised that ideas and deals with an unknown environment.

We hope that you, by the end of this course, will have learned a lot more about robotics but equally important developed essential skills for your future life such, such as building software systems, managing your time and other limited resources and communicating with others in situations where you need to make compromises.

Course content

In the Syllabus, you can find a course summary and links to the Course PM and the course's intended learning outcomes (ILOs).

Information and assignments

You find published information about the course, and published course content, in Modules.

Under Assignments, you will find all submissions that are due during the course. Note that you might find assignments in the modules; it's the same assignment, just linked to from the module.

The first assignment is an individual assignment ("boot camp"). This aims to make all students familiar with the basic methods and software used in the project and as such enable all to contribute better to the project work later. This also serves as the test for the ability to use ROS which is a requirement for the course. You need to pass the boot camp assignment no later than one week after the last official presentation slot to be allowed to continue the course. To get a smooth ride into the project do your best to finish the assignment on time.

The main form of examination in this course is the project work, carried out in groups. The project will be carried out in groups of 3-5 people with a bias towards groups of size 4. The groups will be formed by the teachers. During the project work you will work on three main functions on a mobile robot

Perception: detect and position objects
Localization: estimate the position of the robot (based on information from camera and other sensors)
Planning: plan where to move and how
Arm kinematics and control

and these will be integrated into a system. None of the things above can be done (well) in isolation. You are likely to find that this interaction and integration between parts of the system (and thus often people) is the most challenging aspect in the course and most real work for that matter.

Having completed the boot camp you should have a simple baseline implementation that you can start from on the real hardware. Once making this transition from datasets and simple models to the real world it will be very clear that the real world holds many challenges that you will often have been protected from in other courses but which are important to address in order to operate out there in the wild.

You will have to report on the progress in your group roughly weekly. The main motivation for these reports is to increase the chances that you actually meet and discuss the progress of the work. The reports contain for example, what each person has been doing since the last report, what they plan to do until the next one, if there were any problems, etc. This type of information MUST be shared in the group for the team to function but experience shows that in some groups this does not happen naturally. The report also summarises the status of the overall system and who did what there. We follow the honor code of EECS. For group work, this states that "If students have contributed in varying degrees during group assignments, this shall be openly acknowledged." Participating actively in the reporting is one of the grading criteria in the course and we will ask you to describe who contributed to the report and which process you used to compile it.

There will also be meetings with the teacher and assigned TA where you report progress. These are mandatory.

You can also meet the TA on demand. You call these meetings but remember that you are the ones solving the problems in the course, not the TA. You need to adapt your solution to your abilities, not to your TAs abilities.

Grades

You can find your grades on submitted assignments and quizzes under Grades.

The grading is based on the fulfilment of a set of grading criteria. A more in-depth discussion on the grading criteria and the grading is given here.

Communication and groups

If you want to get in contact with us, use the course slack workspace http://dd2419.slack.com/, unless it is something very personal in which case an email is also possible of course. We think slack is a good tool also to use for the inter group communication and the hope is that it will make us all feel a bit closer in a time when we are all far apart.

This is a project course and a course with a strong focus on applying knowledge and learning to solve problems. A big part of solving problems is connected to acquiring new knowledge to be able to solve the problem and overcome various obstacle that come your way in the process. So, during the project we expect you to solve your own problem to a large extent.

Under the People tab, you can find the project group you will work in. This will be announced when the hardware is handed out, rpiughly two weeks into the course.

Contact information

In this course, you will meet the following people. Please contact us via slack (dd2419.slack.com).

Patric Jensfelt, examiner, course responsible and teacher
Daniel Duberg, senior teaching assistant
Waqas Ali, junior teaching assistant