Students looking for a project
As the section management on iS-Academia is uncomplete at this time please check in the project’s description if it is available for your section before to apply
| Description | |||
| Related sections | IN, MT | ||
| Type | Semester or Master project | ||
| Style | Experimental, Computational | ||
| First assistant | Daniel Tozadore | ||
| Second assistant | |||
| Context | |||
| The lack of technical knowledge to program social robots is presented as a potential barrier for teachers to adopt such robots in their activities. One option to overcome this issue is presenting frameworks with intuitive graphical interfaces where teachers can insert their activities and they are converted in commands to the robot. The goal of this semester project is to develop robust communication between modules of an existing framework through ROS nodes. The modules allow the interaction between students and robots through vision and voice. For this, modules are processing and exchanging information constantly. Tests with a social robot are expected to be performed. | |||
| Work Packages | |||
| 1 | Study and understand the framework | ||
| 2 | Study and implement ROS nodes, publishers and subscribers | ||
| 3 | Integrate the ROS nodes in the framework using PyQT | ||
| 4 | Perform performance tests in the architecture | ||
| 5 | Perform integration tests with a real robot | ||
| 6 | Write a report, including a chapter with recommended changes and adaptations for the “big setup” | ||
| Description | |||
| Related sections | IN, MT | ||
| Type | Semester project | ||
| Style | Theoretical, Experimental | ||
| First assistant | Robert Matthew Mills | ||
| Second assistant | Daniel Tozadore | ||
| Context | |||
| Hiveopolis is a project of the MOBOTS lab which aims to understand the social life of honeybees, a eusocial insect, and how technology can support it. One of the horizons to be reached by the project is the dissemination of its findings to the community, especially in schools. This semester project has the objective of evaluating the potential strategies to extend the knowledge of hiveopolis to schools. The student is expected to understand the functionality of the robotic and electronic elements in our system and be able to design – with the help of the project’s supervisors – educational activities that will be applied in schools in future semesters. Analyses in the schools’ curriculum should be performed for looking for ideal matches of our endings, without the need of changing teachers’ regular chronogram. For example, identifying when teachers have common subjects with our project planned to be taught (such as pollination, communication, social behavior, or thermodynamics) and how we can add our activities in alignment with that. The project should propose one or more activities that could include elements of hiveopolis technology, or a simplified implementation that is more suitable for an educational context. |
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| Desirable Skills |
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| – | Communication Skills | ||
| – | Passion for education |
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| – | Interest in honeybees, ecosystems, or agriculture | ||
| – | Electronic devices knowledge | ||
| Work Packages | |||
| 1 | Study and understand hiveopolis methodologies | ||
| 2 | Analyse schools curriculum | ||
| 3 | Design educational activities | ||
| 4 | Validate the proposed activities with an experienced school teacher of the targeted cycle / age groups | ||
| 5 | Write a report, including a chapter with recommended changes and adaptations for the “big setup” | ||
| Description | |||
| Related sections | MT | ||
| Type | Semester project | ||
| Style | Experimental, Computational | ||
| First assistant | Matthieu Broisin | ||
| Second assistant | Robert Matthew Mills | ||
| Context | |||
| The Hiveopolis project aims at improving the well-being of bees and at studying their behavior, in a global period of disappearance and threatened existence. An important component of that project is hacking communications among bees in order to modulate their foraging behavior, by notably steering it to non-threatening locations (e.g. foraging sites without pesticides). In order to do so, we use honeycombs with piezoelectric elements to send vibrations to bees during this communication process, to provide eventual negative feedback regarding the advertised location. To make sure that the vibrations that bees feel are reliable and consistent with what we sent, we need an external method to measure vibrations, and the associated tools to enable systematic (and ideally automated) characterisation. | |||
| Objective | |||
| To develop methodology and associated tools for systematically characterising the response of electronically-equipped frames to generated vibrations. This semester project is composed of the following milestones : |
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| 1 | Develop and test an external method of measurement for vibrations at the surface of the comb, or at the surface of wax. This method should be as easy as possible to use for the experimentator, robust, and non-intrusive (i.e. not require any modification on the comb for measurement) | ||
| 2 | Test this method on experimental combs that we already developed. | ||
| 3 | Perform a frequency response analysis of different sorts of comb by applying vibration and analysing the resulting vibrations at the surface. | ||
For Mobots or Learn staff
To submit a project please consult: https://wiki.epfl.ch/mobots#SubmitStudentProjects