U of Oregon, Winter 2009, 407/507

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Demonstration
Overview
Expectations/Grading
Syllabus
Reference
Getting Help

Image of students working around a large conference table

Students Coding the BrainStem's IR multi-node network

Demonstration

The students will be demonstrating the work from this quarter at the University of Oregon on March 12th, from 3:30 to 4:30pm in the colloquium room of Deschutes Hall. The final demonstration will show a multi-node communication network based on an extremely limited IR communication capacity. This will be demonstrated by establishing behaviors amongst robotic flowers placed arbitrarily in a mesh network.

Feel free to stop by and check out the demonstration and learn from the students exactly what is going on. There is a puzzle in the behavior of the flowers to be figured out as well.

Contents

Overview

Robotics is a multi-disciplinary embedded programming world. This seminar will introduce some of the challenges of working in a highly constrained world as is often found in embedded and robotics environments.

The hardware we will be using is common amongst research and mobile robots. We will be using this hardware to begin sensing the environment (light and ultrasonics as well as a physical switch) and effecting the environment with LED outputs and a servo actuator. In addition, we will be doing some proprioceptic monitoring of our own battery levels in the hardware.

Using this system, we will then work over the remaining weeks to design and implement a small multi-node network using IR communications and a very limited packet size (2 bytes).

The culmination will hopefully be a network that is resilient to failure of arbitrary nodes that can manage messages between nodes to demonstrate a larger system.

Contents

Expectations/Grading

This course is very hands on and is structured in teams. Many team-based courses illicit mid-quarter complaints of one team member claiming that all the work is done by one member. We will be both evaluating the participation and involvement of all the students as well as asking for team peer evaluations at the end of the course to help grade the work.

Since we will be developing the goals of the course in the first few weeks, there is not a hard-fast list of requirements for a particular grade. Students will have differing abilities and tasks within the teams as is always the case.

Essentially, if you remain engaged in the project, participate fully in the hands-on sessions, and fulfill the weekly assignments, you will do quite well in the course.

As the goals get better established, we can further refine any specific goals that each team must complete as part of the weekly assignments ongoing.

Contents

Syllabus

Here is the rough outline week by week. Later weeks are left more vague as we will be collectively defining a final demonstration project and filling in some of these tasks as the project evolves.

Resources

Week 1, Introduction and Discussion of Final Goal

Week 2, Initial Hardware Setup

Week 3, IR Characterization and Specification

Week 4, Voted From The Island?

Week 5, Initial Network

Week 6, Critical Tests

Reference

There are a few portions of this website you will find yourself continually referring to. Most important of these is the BrainStem reference. That can be found linked off the support tab on any of our website pages in the navigation bar across the top of the page.

As we see other documents being generally used, we will include them here in the reference. Documents relating to a given week's topic of discussion will be referenced in the syllabus entry for that week.

Also, there is a resources page that contains all the basic defines for our project. This resource file will grow as we add our network structure and build on our project milestones.

Contents

Getting Help

This website will offer many useful areas you can use in this course. We will use the Acroname Forums for a message board in this class. Each week will also be outlined here as we work.

To find any of these, type "407" or "507" into the find box of any of our website pages (in the upper right corner). The indexing should be set up to find relevant links.

Revision History:

2008-12-18: Initial Information Posted
2008-12-19: Added information for classroom kit.
2009-01-07: Added more about weeks 2-4, included resource page, and updates.
2009-01-28: Added week 5, tweaked week 4
2009-02-10: Added week 6
2009-02-17: Added week 7
2009-02-25: Added week 8
2009-03-11: Added week 10
2009-03-11: Class Presentation Session (3:30 PST, March 12th)