Autonomous Drone Racing Project Course

Projektpraktikum

In this course, teams of up to 2 students will work jointly to solve the autonomous drone racing problem. The main goal of this course is to teach robotics problem-solving skills as well as project management and teamwork. This course was formerly offered as the "Robot Learning and Control Project Course."

Learning Objectives

Students will learn to independently solve robotics control and learning problems. This includes analyzing the problem, developing a project plan, trading off different solution approaches, and demonstrating the results in a realistic simulation or on real robot hardware. By developing an idea into a real-robot demonstration, students will gain hands-on implementation experience in robot decision-making algorithms. Students will also learn to work efficiently as a team, document approach, and communicate results. The skills acquired in this course are preparation for research, entrepreneurship, or a leadership position in the industry. 

Prerequisites

The prerequisites for this course are fundamental knowledge in robotics, machine learning, control theory, and computer vision as well as experience in Python or C++ programming and Linux (Ubuntu). Experience in the Robot Operating System (ROS) is a plus.

Teaching and Learning Approach

Each team will work on an individual robotics problem with a dedicated advisor. Introductory lectures will be provided to teach approaches and tools for successful robotics problem-solving.  The advisors will support their teams in the process of finding relevant literature, refining the project, and evaluating different solution approaches. They will also give early feedback on the robot demonstration, report, and presentation.

Evaluation

The evaluation for this course is based on (i) the quality of the implementation and the results of the final robot demonstration (50%), (ii) a written report summarizing the results (25%, length of the report: up to 3 double-column pages per team member), and (iii) a final project presentation followed by a Q&A session (25%, length of presentation: 5 minutes per team member).