Afifah: I loved working with Stretch and learn more about physically assistive robotics! I especially appreciated how this capstone focused on real world impact, emphasizing user testing and interviews. I wish there was a bit more on how some of the technical skills we picked up can more broadly be applied and used in other projects.
Andrew: I found it really interesting to design a system that could have a real-world impact, and hearing from users who might benefit from it was both rewarding and motivating. I enjoyed working with Stretch and found the labs helped guide us through system development. However, I think they would have been more effective if we had a clearer idea of our project and design earlier on, so the labs could be more directly aligned with our system. I also would have liked more opportunities to explore the intricacies of Stretch and ROS in greater depth, although I understand that is difficult given the time constraints.
Heer: Having the independence to form our own teams and a fairly open ended project theme was helpful and fun! The weekly blog posts tracking our gradual success ensured that we had concrete goals to work towards every week. The assignment feedback, especially on project related posts was super useful. Being encouraged to conduct user studies helped me bring in what I learned from Maya's HRI class. We all especially learned the level of thought and purposeful planning and testing it takes to develop interactive robot systems from the several iterations we developed. Some buggy ROS details made it difficult to progress onto other parts of implementation as fast as we wanted to, but I recognize that this comes with most software tools.
Simran: I personally enjoyed getting to learn about ROS after being involved with Maya's HRI course and WEIRD lab research; it all came together full circle. The "waiting for robot queue" was great in theory, however in practice it would have been more useful if there was a delegated time slots for each team during class time. It is understandable that all teams want to complete labs and solve bugs. However, we often had to delay running lab code during class time because our turn on the robot queue would not occur, which added additional planning logistics. In terms of what may have been helpful, having two Stretch robots would have made robot booking more available towards the end of the quarter, but I understand that there are financial limitations.
Our team definitely dealt with a lot this quarter, whether it be having 3 seniors, team members juggling jobs, conflicting schedules, or sick team members. We found that adapting and growing our strategies from assignment 2 over time was key to our success. We're all very happy with the outcomes of our collaboration!
What worked especially well was our communication style. We used our group chat not only to plan logistics but to quickly share bugs, solutions, and updates. This fast feedback loop helped us stay on track even when schedules got hectic.
We also kept our plan for collaborative blog posts and documentation. Heer ensured our posts were submitted (or extensions were secured), and we worked together to reflect the full team's input, especially when blog prompts asked for project decisions or reflections. We had a shared drive for all notes, recordings and other class items to make sure all team members stayed up to date, even when some of us were sick.
We followed through on our commitment to shared learning, especially with ROS. We made a conscious effort to rotate the “driver’s seat” during implementation, helping ensure that everyone had a chance to directly develop the projects and grow as newbie roboticists. :) While we had main leads, most of our technical roles around fabrication, UI, user research, and ROS merged together, as we had a lot more full group development than expected.