Week 7: Coaching Questions

What are the major steps of the project? Please list

• Performing a literature study on the abilities on current window-cleaning robots and their motion-planning in particular.
• Determining relevant aspects for the user and listing their requirements, preferences and constraints.
• Discussing design solutions and selecting the best ones.
• Doing assumptions and simplifications in order to make it suitable for modeling.
• Modeling the different algorithms with use of NetLogo.
• Developing an appropriate plan to compare the algorithms.
• Doing an extensive comparison between the algorithms with the developed model.
• Drawing conlusions and giving feedback to user requirements, preferences and constraints.
• Reporting.

What is the most important thing you learned in this project? (e.g .about design or working in groups, etc)
We learned how to manage a project in which a lot of freedom was given. To do this, we created a detailed project planning, gave each other feedback on their tasks and maintained the group process by putting responsibility and liability on the members of the group. It became also clear again, that good communication is essential in doing group work. Therefore, we also planned group meetings outside the tutor meetings to discuss the performed tasks and make agreements for the upcoming week. Besides this, we also learned that it is very important to incorporate aspects that are relevant for the user in a design trajectory.

What do you wish you had spent more time on or done differently?
If we had more time, we would try to make the model more advanced by limiting the assumptions done and tackling the limitations of the model as discussed in the report and on the Wiki. Furthermore we would like to model more of our ideas for motion-planning algorithms. Because the time was limited, we were only able to model the two algorithms which were selected as the best ones.

What was the most enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why
The thing we enjoyed the most were the discussions outside the tutor meetings about which motion-planning algorithm was the best. Besides that, we enjoyed working on a real-life problem, since it could have really some value for the user.

What was the least enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why
Some people may think that the freedom of this project is enjoyable, but our group found this freedom actually really hard to cope with. Because there was no predefined assignment or problem, we found it really hard to choose a subject that was original, innovative and course-related. Because we had some problems with selecting a subject and finding out what we were going to do exactly, we lost some valuable time in the first weeks. Fortunately, the tutor panel helped us in the right direction by providing some critical feedback. The lost time in the beginning of this quartile affected the modelling part of our project since we wanted to model more algorithms than the three that were done eventually.