Personal Journal

Week 1

During the first week we orientated our self with the project. Especially on the expectations of the project and how to present the work.
For this we had to learn how to use the XWiki platform and registered for the Interactive Robotics platform. 

We also came up with a use case and scenario, and picked the robot that we thought could fit best, namely the NAO in combination with a tablet application.
My personal assignment this week was to work out the use case and put it on the XWiki page. I also looked into the Choregraphe system for controlling the NAO robot as the Interactive Robotics platform besides not being fully English also seemed to restrict some of the functionality that would be desired by our use of the robot. 

Week 2

In the second week we picked up speed and started working on the Foundation pages and created the planning page. We split the group up into 3 smaller teams of 2 persons each which was possible as the other groupmate Kexin chose to leave the course. My team, Dongxu and me, worked on the two technology pages. While working on both the Music Management and Humanoid Robot page we had to come up with some specifications that where not previously discussed with the team. Therefore for next week we plan on discussing these concepts in order that the other pages wont deviate from our pages. 

Week 3

During week three we learned about user stories, design patterns and ontologies. We continued with our strategy of splitting the group into smaller teams to complete different parts of the required work. This meant that I with my sub-team got to work on the ontologies and design patterns. We also picked a date with our team and then booked lab time on that date to work with the NAO robot next week. Therefore, I continued with testing different Choregraphe functions in anticipation of working with the real robot. 

Week 4

During this week I worked on parts of the final evaluation on the XWiki, however the lack of precise ideas about the type and extend of our evaluation prevented the creating the exact specifications for the evaluation. Furthermore I worked on the slides for the presentation next week and attended the lectures. We also set up a timeslot in the INSYGHTLab to work with the NAO robot. The prepared Choregraphe program did unfortunately not work as expected when ran on the robot. However, as we started fairly on time, there still was development time ahead to work on a better implementation.   

Week 5

During a large portion of this week I unfortunately had corona, therefore I missed the presentations in this week. I did work on the parts of the presentation that were subsequently presented by Dongxu. At the end of the week on Friday I did get to go out of self isolation and was present to work on the robot prototype. However, there were still difficulties with getting the robot to consistently act as wanted and with getting the speech recognition to work accurately.  

Week 6

This week I attended the Monday lecture about inclusive design, we also started with planning for the final evaluation and created a planning for how the final few weeks of the course should look for our team to finish everything on time. From this planning I was assigned to write 3 foundation XWiki pages together with Andrei.  

Week 7

During the 7th and almost last week of the project we were busy with planning the evaluation, preparing the robot for the evaluation and the organisation around the evaluation, like getting enough participants. At the start of the week this was still not entirely finished, this caused some time pressure to get everything in order. This however had the advantage of us getting a presentation day the next week on the Tuesday instead of the Monday  . During the week I, and other team members went to the evaluations of multiple other groups to help them perform their evaluation. This also caused group members from their teams to show up at our evaluation, which helped with getting enough participants. Seeing the other groups their evaluations also helped with getting a idea for our own evaluation. The finishing up of the robot happened on Friday morning, as that was the best time for everyone, which was the same day the final evaluation took place, thus there was some time pressure that day to get it to work. However, in the end the robot was in a working condition, with the help of Ruud, far in time. Which helped with the remainder of the evaluation as the time each person took to take the evaluation was somewhat larger then previously planned. In the end the evaluation went better than expected. 

Week 8

During the last week we worked on the presentation that we needed to hold on the Tuesday. We looked at the results of the evaluation and concluded that the results were not as expected, but interesting enough to present during the presentation. We held the presentation and started on fixing the XWiki pages that received feedback. We also received feedback during the presentation which we needed to incorporate into the XWiki. I also updated the time table and my personal planning as they got somewhat behind during the project as other tasks seemed to have a higher time priority. In the end, while writing this almost being done with the course, I did learn a lot more about from the ground up design of systems and project management then expected. And can I honestly say that my only regret was that the course was so short.