Individual Reflection

Eric - The most fun part of the Robotics Capstone was testing the robot with real patients and seeing their reactions—it made the project feel impactful and real. The most useful aspect was learning how to integrate multiple ROS nodes for a complete system, from perception to action. Some of the lectures felt too high-level and didn’t translate directly into our implementation work. It would have been helpful to have earlier access to hardware and more detailed examples of successful past projects to guide our initial design decisions.

Iman - The most fun aspect of the Robotics Capstone was learning new tools such as ROS 2, RViz, and exploring the full capabilities of the Stretch robot. It was especially exciting to see our implementations come to life, like aligning the robot’s base to the patient’s arm, and designing a system that could meaningfully assist diabetic patients with mobility limitations made the project feel impactful beyond just a classroom exercise. The most useful part of the course was gaining hands-on experience with modular robot software design using ROS 2, which allowed me to research and implement solutions grounded in real user needs. I found many resources from the course and the Stretch robot repository helpful in building key functionalities. One aspect I found less useful was the outdated tutorials, which sometimes slowed down our progress, and some hardware/software instructions were not directly relevant to our specific project. Something that would have been useful but was missing is better documentation for debugging ROS 2, especially around TF transforms, camera calibration, and latency, which would have saved us significant time. At the end, the course helped me better understand a wide range of robotics topics, and the support from the TAs was crucial in overcoming technical challenges; having more up-to-date and comprehensive documentation would make future development even smoother.

Sohrab - Overall, the project and the week went great! could've been better in terms of timing and scheduling each phase of the project. As someone with no prior experience with robotics, some labs felt like it was a big jump. For example, it was challenging to learn the saving poses, and I struggled with it at the beginning. Then I wasn't sure how to use Aruco Markers to detect the object, like it did on RVIZ, and how to use that in my code. After working with all that and saving Stretch poses for the navigation and alignment was the next challenge. 

It took a while to run the code and fix the navigation with high accuracy. As an individual, I worked on saving/call-back for poses and saving/call-back for the robot navigation. I'm happy with my own progress and how far I have come; it has helped me to learn a lot because I wasn't familiar with any of the terminology and technologies like ROS, Rviz, and the Stretch robot. 

A suggestion would be to work on the lab and work on the interface, poses, navigation, and alignment simultaneously from the beginning of the class, because some might need more time to finish their projects or their part than others.