Student projects PROJ‑H‑402

Please read carefully the rules of PROJ-H-402

Vocal organizer to improve autonomy of people with a disability

People with memory loss are sometimes unable to use a usual agenda (inability to read or visual trouble).

We are looking for a student who could developp a mobile app used as a vocal organizer that could help people in this situation. This project is based on a real need in the sector of disability. It requires to meet the therapist’s functional criterias and the innovation to create a useful and affordable structuring tool for the daily use of diverse types of patients.

Requirements: Mobile App development. An interest in the sector of disability is adventageous but not required.

Working language: English

Contact: Miquel Kegeleirs, Joy Vrancken and Mauro Birattari

Automating Quality Control in Bibliography Management

We have recently started a curated bibliography collection related to swarm robotics research. We are looking for a student to help us automate the quality control of that bibliography collection.

The goal of this project is to integrate validation of commited edits into an automatic workflow, for example using GitHub Actions.

Requirements: Knowledge of Bibtex, Python, Git and the GitHub platform. Knowledge of Docker and GitHub Actions (or similar CI platforms) is advantageous but not required.

Working language: English

Contact: Jonas Kuckling and Mauro Birattari

Developing a Swarm Robotics Video Game

Swarm robotics is a subfield of robotics, where a decentralized group of robots work together to perform a task that no individual robot could perform alone.

The goal of this project is to develop a videogame based on the theme of swarm robotics. You are free to choose the genre, target platform (PC, mobile, web) and game mechanics. If you are interested, please also submit a first sketch of your ideas (not more than one page).

Requirements: Knowledge of C# and the Unity game-engine. Knowledge of other game-engines would also be acceptable. Previous experience with game design or swarm robotics is advantageous but not required.

Working language: English

Contact: Jonas Kuckling and Mauro Birattari

Pick My Brain

Have you ever noticed that some things are harder to learn by heart than others?

Wheither it is to learn a language, physics definitions, geography, or biological facts about worms, people tend to remember quite easily some of the things they learn, and experience difficulties to remember others. The goal of the project is to develop an app that will help users learn these "I can never remember" things.

Requirements: Mobile App development or Web programming.

Working language: English

Contact: Antoine Ligot and Mauro Birattari

Team Sport Assistant Manager

Managing a collective sport team is a time consuming task, even on an amateur level. The main difficulty is to maintain a good atmosphere within the team, which involves keeping all individuals content. The main task for the "manager" of a group is to compose the team that will compete in official matches. To do so, they need to keep track of different statistics, such as their availability, the presence to training sessions, their performance, etc.

The goal of this project is to create an Assistant Manager tool that helps the current manager in their day to day supervision of an amateur team of futsal. It will include the establishment of communication between the Assistant Manager and the players, as well as the tracking and display of statistics about the team and players. Eventually, some AI could be implemented to automatize the team selection for official matches based on the statistics collected.

Requirements: web programming

Working language: English

Contact: Antoine Ligot and Mauro Birattari

Web Crawler to Collect Scientific Events

The student will neeed to develop a crawler that will collect data from a set of predefined websites and mailing lists about scientific events and organizers in a given timeline and save them in a database. The student can use Scrapy an open source Python framework for extracting data.

The goal of this project is to collect scientific events for SciVenia - a platform that helps scientists and researchers apply for scientific events like trainings, Ph.D. schools, conferences, workshops, symposiums etc. The project will focus on flilling information for SciVenia in a format that is used by the platform.

Requirements: Knowledge of Python, good programming skills

Working language: English

Contact: Darko Bozhinoski and Mauro Birattari

Swarm Runner: a tool for automatically executing experiments

The student neeed to develop a tool to execute robot swarm experiments with minimum effort. Initially, the student will develop a set of benchmark tasks that can be used by swarm designers to test their algorithms. Then, he will use a set of the preexisting AUTOMODE methods to test the tool. The user of the tool need to be able to specify the following: (i) which metrics to be collected and logged for benchmarking; (ii) specification of the task, the environment, the number of robots and which algorithms to be run to obtain swarm control software,; (iii) visualizing the obtained results (collected metrics).

The goal of this project is for swarm roboticists to design reusable experiments that can be tested on multiple benchmarks. The goal is to be make the results from the experiments publicle availalbe for other robot swarm designers to test their algorithms.

Requirements: Knowledge of Python and C++, good programming skills

Working language: English

Contact: Darko Bozhinoski and Mauro Birattari

Academic Twitter bot for tracking and communicating swarm robotics research

In recent years, Twitter has become a suitable option to anounce, track, and measure the impact of the publication of new research. We are interested in using Twitter to automate the communication of research work focused on swarm robotics and, in particular, the work produced by researchers at IRIDIA.

The goal of this project is to create a Twitter bot that reacts to information published in academic platforms like Google Scholar and other relevant academic websites. The bot should be capable of providing impact metrics and also of maintaining minimal interactions with Twitter users.

Requirements: Knowledge of Python, Git and the GitHub platform. Knowledge of Twitter and Google Scholar APIs is advantageous but not required.

Working language: English

Contact: David Garzón Ramos and Mauro Birattari

Generative art creator

Generative art is a form or design in which an autonomous system produces (in whole or in part) an artwork. The artist defines a set of rules that provide boundaries to the design process and a computer follows those rules to create a new piece. We are looking for a student to help us develop a generative art creator that integrates some of these approaches and (possibly) that explores new ones based on swarm intelligence principles.

The goal of this project is to develop a platform to create and experiment with generative art in different media formats (images, animation, etc). It is expected that the platform would include common functionalities to import, export, and share the artwork that is produced.

Requirements: Knowledge of Python, Git and the GitHub platform. Experience in art production is advantageous but not required.

Working language: English

Contact: David Garzón Ramos and Mauro Birattari

Design of a swarm tracker

In both natural and artificial swarms, agents interact with each other and the environment to achieve a common goal. The emergent behaviour is both difficult to predict and difficult to anaylse.

The goal of this project is to develop a video processing tool that will track the movements of a swarm. Using computer vision, the tool should be able to generate trajectories for each individual agent of the swarm. Each trajectory shoud contain both spatial and temporal data to allow researchers to analyse and reproduce the behaviour of the swarm.

Requirements: Knowledge of Python (optionally, C/C++), some notion of computer vision and OpenCV.

Working language: English

Contact: Guillermo Legarda Herranz and Mauro Birattari

Developing a GUI for an interactive RGB block

The smart object was developed as an interactive obstacle for robot swarm applications. It may display different colours using an array of LEDs, detect the colour of the ground and sense forces applied to it.

The goal of this project is to develop a graphical user interface (GUI) to program and interact with the smart object. The user should be able to control the object through wireless communication and specify both its current state and the desired reaction to sensor inputs.

Requirements: Knowledge of C/C++ and Python, an interest in microcontroller programming. Some knowledge of TCP and GUI design is advantageous but not required.

Working language: English

Contact: Guillermo Legarda Herranz and Mauro Birattari

Programming a cellular automaton

Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton designed by John Horton Conway in 1970. The user specifies an initial state and the rules of the automaton determine its evolution.

The goal of this project is to program an efficient implementation of Conway's Game of Life in C. Careful memory management and efficient computing are required, as the number of alive states may grow very quickly. A graphical user interface (GUI) should allow the user to set any desired initial state and observe the evolution of the automaton.

Requirements: Knowledge of C. Some experience in GUI design is advantageous, but not required.

Working language: English

Contact: Guillermo Legarda Herranz and Mauro Birattari

Projects proposed by other professors/groups are listed here