Student Projects

Robotics News and Society Reports

Individual project. Choose a news story in a popular national or international news source concerning robotics from the past five years.  Your assignment is to read the article, then prepare an analytical in-class presentation that you will give.  The presentation should summarize the article, then evaluate the news story from technical, rhetorical and sociological points of view.  What merit and shortcomings does the story have? What impact does this article have on society and on decision-makers?  Your presentation is oral and backed by visuals to be presented from a computer. You should post the visuals and source story on our open class site, and the entire presentation you make should be 10 minutes long.  You will be graded based on the quality of your analysis, the quality of your visuals and the quality of your presentation.

CPSR Policy Review

Group project. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is an example of a professional technical organization dedicated to comprehending and scaffolding the practice of computer science in an ethical manner.  This group project, which will involve half of the class, is a major research and presentation effort.  This group must conduct a survey of groups like CPSR which may be acting within a variety of technical niches (e.g. all of engineering as in IEEE, and specific disciplines such as CS and Civil Engineering).  Characterize the existing body of such organizations as well as the impact they do or do not have on their communities.  Next, do a search across robotic to identify any professional organizations within robotics that attend to ethical consequences or frameworks for the practice of robotics.  Again, characterize the effectiveness of these existing organization.  This group’s deliverable is a forty minute presentation in-class, using visuals that should be posed on the class website as well as links to organizations’ websites if appropriate.  The in-class presentation should involve all members of the group and should analyze in detail at least four professional organizations.

RPSR Document Drafts

Phased group project. A major effort in this course will be a two-phased process of imagining and suggesting the structure, vision and activities of a Robotics Professionals for Social Responsibility organization.  Phase 1 will yield a draft charter for such a group, and will involve half of the students in the class.  Phase 2 will iterate on the charter draft and will involve all the students in the class working on a variety of sub-parts.  For phase 1, you will present your first draft in class.  On the class website, you should have the full draft openly available, as well as any attendant information and all the visuals that you will use during your 40 minutes presentation in class.  All members of the group must participate in this presentation.  You also have the freedom to change the name of this proposed organization during the creation of the first draft, as well as its scope.

Final Project: Medical Robotics and Quality of Life Robotics

Individual project.  The major, graded individual project near course completion is an application of all class materials and learning to the subfield of medical robotics of quality of life robotics.  Each student will choose a specific robotics project that in current and ongoing in one of the aforementioned subfields.  The student’s assignment is to learn as much as possible about this specific project, then create a written analysis of the project from an ethics standpoint.  The student deliverables include: a written summary and ethical analysis that should be 5-15 pages; visuals that will be used for a 15 minute presentation in-class; an in-class presentation during the last two days of the semester.  The ethical analysis is a real opportunity to apply what is learned in the class. To succeed the student should meaningfully and concretely evaluate not only the project as-is but also possible futures that the project ought to and could inhabit.  Think deeply, and be much more than  a straightforward technologist.