Weekly Milestones

Owned by Baraka, K. (Kim)
Last updated: Nov 17, 2023
11 min read

N.B.: This page is not currently up-to-date and will be updated soon

Below we discuss what is expected from you and make several suggestions on how to make the most out of the practical sessions each week throughout the course. There will be 7 weeks of practical sessions, in week 8 you will present your project to other groups (and to the general audience in the NU lobby). It is very important to use the practical sessions as effectively as possible as only in those sessions you will have access to the robot. Therefore, we advice you to focus on those project tasks for which you need access to a robot during the practical sessions. Find and agree on time slots other than those at which your practical session has been scheduled to work on all other project tasks (e.g., discuss design with your group, organize and assign tasks, document writing, etc.).

During the project you will iteratively improve both your design and robot software. Your design should inform your software development and your robot software should correspond with the design documented in your design document. This means you will need to continuously update and improve your robot software as well as your design document based upon new insights, input, and feedback you receive.

In the following, we will provide you with certain aspects and pointers for each week. For each week, we show what you should focus on regarding the code (Robot software part) and regarding the design document (Design document part).

Important note: Please make sure to always check the course schedule and see important deadlines section on this page. Furthermore, stay tuned on Slack and on Canvas as we will post important announcement via those channels.

Week 44 (Course week 1)

Robot software part:

To be able to effectively use the first practical session at the start of the course, you should come prepared and already have installed the Social Interaction Cloud infrastructure. Before handling the robot in the lab, make sure you also have read and view the videos in the Do’s and don’ts of working with the NAO robot section.

The main goal of this session is to make sure you can connect to the robot and test that you are able to make the robot do various things. Make sure to test:

  • Waking up and putting the robot back to rest;

  • Speech recognition (you need to have created a Google Dialogflow agent for this);

  • Sound generation (incl. speech);

  • Robot gestures.

Note that you can use speech recognition and generation also without the robot but you need the robot to be able to perform robot gestures.

Tip: If you disregard gesture commands that are robot specific (such as changing the LEDs of the NAO robot’s eyes), you can also work on your code when not having access to a NAO robot.

Also, your group will have access to a Groups Github repo where you should work together on the code for your project. Your TA will give you access to your repo (please share your Github account, so access can be given).

Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment (to be announced during lectures)!

Design document:

The first week your group should think of an interaction problem your group wants to focus on. You can also think about a motivating case/start digging into the literature and get familiar with the academic literature in the field. Also, you can think of some ways to evaluate your interaction problem.

  • Update your work logbook in which every student writes down on what they have worked on during the week. This is really important, as we regularly check this to see your progress and your contributions! Check the course schedule for day and time!

  • Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment (to be announced during lectures)!

Week 45 (Course week 2)

Robot software part:

Develop the basic capabilities that you will need for the social interaction problem that your socially interactive robot tackles:

  • Start working on gestures, the use of LEDs, and sound effects you may want to use. Try to divide the work as much as possible between yourselves (working in pairs is known to work well).

  • Start working on a dialogue capability for your robot that will enable the robot to have a conversation/dialogue. Extend your Dialogflow agent if needed with new intents and entities.

Don’t forget to update your group Github repository at least once at the end of every week from now on!

Design document:

The description for this week is short but during this week much of the work that you will build on in later weeks needs to be done. First and foremost, you should pick your interaction problem and an associated key measure. You should also check the literature and see how this problem has been tackled by other researchers (you should, at the end when you submit your paper, cite at least 5 scientific papers). Please submit your description of your idea and the interaction problem on Canvas!

Deadlines:

  • Update your work logbook in which every student writes down on what they have worked on during the week. This is really important, as we regularly check this to see your progress and your contributions! Check the course schedule for day and time!

  • Pick your interaction problem and an associated preliminary key measure. See the assignment on Canvas! Check the course schedule for day and time!

  • Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment!

Week 46 (Course week 3)

Robot software part:

Continue with developing your robot software. Try to create a first fully working version of the dialogue capability that you started working on last week.

You should start thinking about how to realize the main effects of your robot on its social interaction problem that you want to evaluate at the end of the project.

You could this week put more effort in, for example, the non-verbal skills of your robot. Think about how to create new gestures and make the robot perform these, about using additional sound effects, or other features that may be relevant to your particular social interaction problem.

Update your Github repo!

Design document:

It is important to make precise what the main effect(s) are that you would like to achieve. You should specify these and formulate a research question. Also, you should think about how you are going to evaluate this question. Incorporate those aspects in your design document.

When writing the Method/Evaluation section take into account that you will only have a very limited number of participants that will take part in your evaluation study (two other groups with 6 members each, therefore a total of 12 students). It therefore is very unlikely that you will be able to obtain any interesting quantitative findings and you might want to focus on the more qualitative aspects of your interaction design, problem, and design objective in your evaluation. Also be aware that you need to specify exactly the procedure for evaluating your robot to ensure that the reproducibility of your study design is given.

Also note that you need to think about ethical approval for your study. In our case, we do not need to go through the full process but please briefly reflect on ethical issues your participants might face when taking part in your study and perform an ethical self-check.

Make sure you update other design document sections to keep them up to date with your latest ideas and the changes that are implied by the design decisions you have made this week. Remember to continuously update your design document as during the project you will iteratively improve your design.

Important:

Given that next week students from Utrecht University (UU) will visit your practical lab sessions, you will have to prepare a deck of slides to pitch your idea to them. Please upload those on Canvas!

The exact date and time of the visit of the UU can be seen in the document uploaded on the course schedule for week 4.

In addition to the UU students visiting the practical sessions of the VU, you will also peer-review the ideas of other groups. On this way, you can give each other valuable feedback!

  • Upload the deck of slides. Check the course schedule for day and time!

  • Update your work logbook in which every student writes down on what they have worked on during the week. This is really important, as we regularly check this to see your progress and your contributions! Check the course schedule for day and time!

  • Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment!

Week 47 (Course week 4)

The goal of this week is to get inspired by both the UU students and your peers! Make sure to make notes on the feedback you get!

Robot software part:

At the end of the practical sessions of this week you should have your first prototype of your project ready. Hence, make sure that the most important features are working and that you can demo your interaction idea.

Update your Github repo!

Design document:

This week you should also have coded your first robot prototype. Therefore it is a good time to start working on the Interaction design section and the approach overview section. Also, you can start working on the subsections of describing each component used in the interaction chosen.

  • Update your work logbook in which every student writes down on what he/she has worked on during the week. This is really important, as we regularly check this to see your progress and your contributions! Check the course schedule for day and time!

  • Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment!

Week 48 (Course week 5)

Robot software part:

Use the first part of the practical session this week to make code changes and updates to incorporate new ideas and suggestions that you have received from the UU theatre students. It is up to you to decide whether and what you do with their input.

Keep in mind that next week you will need to finalize your robot software.

Update your Github repo!

Design document:

During this week the theatre students will share their ideas on shaping the performance of a socially interactive robot in the form of an annotated moodboard. A moodboard is often used by designers to collect materials in a collage to identify relevant inspiration materials for their design projects, for aesthetics, style, and design direction. The moodboard will provide multiple sources of inspiration for you to design your interactive robot. The annotations are short texts to explain why a source might be relevant. In the middle of the week, on Wednesday, you will also be able to interact online with the theatre students to ask questions and discuss their ideas (see the Course schedule).

Reflect on and consider whether, and, if so, how you can incorporate ideas you get from the moodboard. You are free to use the moodboards in the way you see fit, based on your focus and other design decisions. Whatever you do, you should at least give the moodboard some thought and consideration and document the process on how you reflected on the moodboard from the UU theatre students in the design document. Don’t forget to update other (sub)sections in your Interaction design section too.

  • Update your work logbook in which every student writes down on what he/she has worked on during the week. This is really important, as we regularly check this to see your progress and your contributions! Check the course schedule for day and time!

  • Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment!

Week 49 (Course week 6)

Robot software part:

This week you need to finalize your code and make the final preparations for the evaluation of your robot. While you work on finishing the implementation of your design, you should also make sure that your code os robust and reproducible! You should document everything that is needed in case someone else wants to run your experiment. Also provide a requirements.txt file or similar which includes necessary libraries and dependencies on might have to install prior to conducting your experiment.

Update your Github and push your final code to Github! Please check the deadline in the course schedule!

Design document:

You should focus most of your effort on completing the Methods section of your design document. In particular, make sure that you complete the evaluation procedure (evaluation question, study design etc.).

Also, prepare all the materials needed to execute the experiment (think about instructions on how to execute the code, instructions on where to locate and how to store log files, questionnaires, and any other materials that are needed). You should include those in the appendix section of your design document!

Tip: Ask your TA to review the evaluation procedure and perform the evaluation during your practical session.

  • At the end of this week, upload the experiment procedure and all associated materials. Please check the deadline in the course schedule! Update your work logbook in which every student writes down on what he/she has worked on during the week. This is really important, as we regularly check this to see your progress and your contributions!

  • Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment!

  • Also, the UU students will come and visit the VU lab for a second time. The schedule is uploaded on the course schedule.

Week 50 (Course week 7)

During this week, your group will run the experiments. The experiment schedule will be shared with you ahead of time. Make sure you execute the evaluation procedure exactly as it dictates. Also, carefully collect the data for each subject as explained in the evaluation protocol. Document any noticeable events that happened (e.g., issues with getting the code to run on the robot, issues with the robot interaction, etc.). Also, combine all the data that has been collected and start to analyze the data (remember, you need to submit your final report already next week!).

In one of your practical sessions, you will also Create video material of your robot in action. This video functions only as a backup in case on the day of your presentation something will go wrong (of course, we do not hope so!). Please upload your final video in the Google Drive folder of your group.

Design document:

During this week, you will also receive feedback from the UU students as they are going to submit their robot review. You can have a look at this and can reflect upon this and see what might aspects could be discussed in your design document.

Further improve your design document and make sure it accurately reflects your implementation (perhaps you included design features in an earlier version of your document that you were not able to realize). Also, finalize the Implementation section documenting your robot software. Also start to incorporate the experimental data to the report. Add the findings of your robot to the design document and discuss these. Add a Summary/Conclusion section in which you summarize your design objective of your project and present the main highlights (results) and lessons learnt.

  • Update your work logbook in which every student writes down on what he/she has worked on during the week. This is really important, as we regularly check this to see your progress and your contributions! Check the course schedule for day and time!

Final poster:

Prepare a poster (A0 format!) that will support your final presentation (see the info below). It should include:

  1. Key take-away message

  2. Research question and method used

  3. Results (obtained from running the experiments)

  4. Conclusion and points for further research

A template can be found here:

Upload the final poster on Canvas!

Check the course schedule for a potential individual micro-assignment!

Week 51 (Course week 8)

Design document:

In this week, your group should finalize the design document and upload the final version to the Google Drive.

Finally, each group member should write a half-a-page individual project summary and add this to the Individual contribution summary of the appendix. Please make sure to include your experiment material in the Appendix as well!

Important note: Be aware of the final presentation on Tuesday, 20.12. Please check the schedule of the group!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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