Post 20: Quarter reflection

Shey: The most fun part was interacting with the robot and seeing it respond to what we had programmed. Although I mainly focused on the UI and system architecture and didn’t get much hands-on time with the hardware, it was still rewarding to see our work come together. The most useful aspect of the course was the lab sessions, which provided helpful tutorials on ROS and gave us the opportunity to ask questions to the professor and TAs. One thing that might have been useful but was missing was the chance to receive feedback from our peers or review great examples from previous quarters. 

Tony: I thought that working with Stretch and seeing its capabilities, as well as working with my teammates, was the most fun part of the course. Since I worked mainly with poses, the most useful part of the course was the lab 13 about how to save and replay poses, as well as Michael’s tutorial on how to do so. Something that wasn’t as useful was the tutorial on the controller teleop. While it worked in the first part of the course, I ran into some issues in the second half where it just refused to work (I think it was something to do with the battery in hindsight). One thing that might have been useful was a tutorial on how to have the robot detect/output sound.

Evan: The most fun part for me this quarter was to work on the robot together with my teammates and try to figure out how to do or debug something. I would say all the labs are very useful. And I want to give special thanks to Michael for all the helps he offered during lab sessions which are tremandeously useful. Waht didn't work out as well was sharing the robot during those sessions. Since we are all gathered together for labs but only one team got to use the robot, it was a pretty inefficient use of time at least for me. One thing I think the course could be improved would be to either have more than one robots(don't have to be stretch), have better simulators, or each team has different time slots for labs.

Diana: The most fun part was that everything about the project was decided and created entirely by us. We discussed the topic of the project, what the outcome would be, and worked together. It was really rewarding learning a lot along the way and experiencing many things I had never done before. The most useful part was the support from Michael and Maya. They were very helpful when I needed help. Some of the demos for hello robot that didn't work was not so useful. Some of the demos were old, weird, and didn't work, so the process of using them was sometimes frustrating. The only thing that was helpful, but lacking, was probably the robot calendar at the end of the quarter. The robot calendar worked well for most of the quarter, but at the end of the quarter, many teams would book too many hours at once, making it difficult to use the robot.