Final project proposal information

Your project proposal should contain:

• A title, a list of the group members (with email addresses), and an abstract --- The abstract should be a single paragraph that gives a general description of your project. I will put the titles, groups (less email addresses, which are for my reference), and abstracts off the projects web page. Please email me this information in addition to including it in you final project proposal.

• What you will do --- Give a detailed technical list. You should structure your project in a sequence of steps. What are the goals of your project?

  You could think of this part of your proposal as a checklist for me to use when evaluating your project. Remember that the project proposal can be renegotiated during the semester (deadline for final project renegotiations is April 17).

  What will you do if your project is easier/harder than expected? What will you have done for Phase 1 (due March 29)? Generally speaking, Phase 1 should be some partial implementation (with the rest to be implemented in Phase 2) or some initial implementation (a complete but simple or inefficient implementation which will be improved in Phase 2). If you are building hardware, you should try to have any hardware built by then. You should have something to demonstrate for Phase 1.

  Try to lay out a timeline for your project. Also, how will you divide the work amongst the members of your group?

• The techniques you will use --- What approaches and methods will you use to accomplish your project goals? Be as specific as possible.

• The expected results and how you will evaluate them --- You must do some sort of evaluation of your project; the details will vary from project to project. This might be some test or metric to evaluate the performance of the system or some characterization of what your system can do. Generally speaking, this could be running time, computational complexity, characterization of the inputs that are handled correctly/optimally. For most projects, experimental evaluation of system performance is appropriate.

• A list of at least 5 references --- If I had thought of this earlier, I would have required a summaries of these references to be part of your project proposal. Instead, the summaries will be due March 20. These summaries should be able to be incorporated almost directly into your final project report.

  The point of this requirement is to do some background reading on your project. Who has done similar things, what techniques did they use, and what were their results? You should do a little research in the library (or on the online INSPEC database) to find some related papers from the robotics literature. For some projects, I can point you to some relevant papers.