Motivation

After having done the course, Social Signal Processing (SSP) and Conversational Agents (CA) in the first quarter of the year, my interest in human machine interaction related tasks spiked. I believe that interaction with robots is something that is still seen as an enigma but the majority many around, and hence taking this course allowed to deep delve into the planning and design of this myself. Additionally, I have never before worked with the physical version of a robot (only virtual versions), hence working with Pepper seemed to be quite an exciting task. Overall I am content with what the course had to offer, and I believe I learned a lot from its contents. 

Weekly Contribution Breakdown

The following section highlights my weekly contributions from the start to the end of the project.

Week 1

• Researching about the various robots that we are allowed to work with and the advantages and disadvantages of all
• Weekly meeting to agree on the specifics of the project
• Wrote the initial version of environment and stakeholders (with Pierre & Haoran)

Week 2

• Updating the wiki regarding the week 2 schedule
• Defining initial personas with background (with Pierre)
• Thinking about the initial objectives of the project (with Pierre)

Week 3

• Weekly Meeting with the entire group
• Defining initial UCs with their pre-conditions, post-conditions and action sequence (with Pierre)
• Assessing the feasibility of UCs based on extent of technical implementation

Week 4

• Research about ideal way to handle design patterns
• initial work on TDPs (with Pierre)
• initial work on Ontology

Week 5

• Feedback on presentation 
• Finishing up Ontology 
• Updating corresponding wiki pages

Week 6

This week's contribution was minimal due to some health conditions

Week 7

• Updating TDP after feedback
• Updating IDP after feedback
• Updating ontology after feedback
• Updating UCs after feedback
• Updating and linking appropriate claims and objectives to UCs
• Organizing materials for evaluation activity
• Conducting evaluations 
• Preparing presentation slides
• Rehearsing for presentation

Week 8

• Reviewing various wiki pages
• Creating action sequence diagrams
• Taking images process images for wiki
• Reviewing specifications and adding descriptions (for functions, claims and objectives)
• Updating the Ontology
• Peer reviewing and revising various other pages 
• Testing the final code to check for many unusual behavior 

Personal Reflection

Through the course of this project I gained crucial knowledge about many new domains that I was unfamiliar with. Being the first time that I work with human robot interaction, I realized that design specifications can be extremely important and must be well defined in order to keep the stakeholders and functionality in mind. I also really enjoyed working with Pepper, as it was one of the first times seeing a humaniod robot in action.

Along with this, I think the course structure was optimal as it allowed us as a group to discuss ideas with the professors and also get real time feedback on our work. Lastly I also learned how to work in a large group and divide up tasks and responsibilities among team members. Although I did not have the same specific task throughout the project, I aided in most aspects of the project ranging from the initial design to the evaluation and results.