Project

Overview

The goal of the term project is to give you the opportunity to get your hands dirty on a concrete problem related to real-time systems, fault-tolerant systems, and related domains such as sensor networks, robotics, multimedia, etc. The project will be performed in teams of 2 students for undergraduates and individually for graduate students. Each team/student will prepare a project proposal in consultation with the lecturer. Further, the teams will be responsible for frequent progress reports, demos, a term paper, and final presentation.

Structure of Project

Each graduate student will draft a project proposal in consultation with the instructor. Projects will be in the areas of sensor networking, robotics, embedded computing, energy management, etc. Undergraduate teams will provide two proposals. The first one, due early in the semester, will suggest a simple project, to be finished before mid-term, in the areas of sensor networking and robotics, etc (see below for more information on topics). The idea is that students without knowledge in real-time systems will have a difficult time to find appropriate project topics. Therefore, the first part is intended to support students in finding a problem of their interest. The second, more thorough and detailed, proposal is due before mid-term and will describe a concrete problem and outline a solution to be implemented and evaluated by the students.
Each student/team will meet regularly (weekly) with the instructor to discuss progress, problems, next steps, etc. Another milestone will be a draft of a term paper due late November. These drafts will be reviewed (by other students and the instructor) and a final term paper is due early December. Finally, each student/team will present the results in a small workshop-style event. If students can also show a demo, they are highly encouraged to do so (and will also be rewarded with extra credit).

Project Proposal

The proposal is document that describes in detail the problem you are trying to solve, the method you will apply to solve the problem, the hardware/software artifacts involved, how you will evaluate your solution (e.g., comparing to existing solutions), and other information such as a timeline and preliminary related work (bibliography). More information can be found here.

Term Paper

It is wise to start writing toward your final document very early (e.g., write the proposal and progress reports so that they can be reused in the final document). While reading papers for the paper study, have a close look at the outline and style. You will see that the structure of these papers are very similar (abstract, introduction, approach, implementation, evaluation, related work, summary, future work), try to structure your reports/paper accordingly.

Project Ideas

For graduate students: discuss potential projects with the instructor. If you are involved in research projects, the term project may be designed to fit into your goals for your research projects. The instructor has a number of challenges and problems you can choose from, including problems such as resource management, routing, data aggregation, energy-efficiency, real-time communication, clock synchronization, etc., in wireless ad-hoc, sensor, or embedded systems. The same hardware as for undergraduates (see below) is also available for graduate students.

For undergradutate students: the first half of the semester should be dedicated to getting acquainted with the given hardware/software, improve the programming skills, identify challenging applications and problems in real-time systems, and solve a relatively simple programming task. The second half of the semester will be used to solve a concrete problem based on the achievements from the first part of the project. Ideally, the term projects will either implement a novel, interesting application in sensor networking, wireless computing, or robotics, or address a concrete challenge. For example, consider the following potential problems: use our sensor nodes to monitor something of relevance, e.g., activities in a room, increase in temperature in a cluster room, the movements and activities of a person, etc. Or use our robots to help a child from a burning building, replace a seeing-eye dog with a robot, find locations of activity (fire, explosion, screams, etc.) and identify victims of an accident, etc. Or combine both (sensors and robots), where sensors steer robots toward a location of interest (to check out activity), robots replace failed sensor nodes, etc.

The available hardware for these projects include: