Proposal Number: 1 Best Proposal Prize? Yes Clarity Rating: 10 Project Idea Rating: 9 ---------------------------- FEEDBACK: Introduction This is an excellent introduction. It is not filled with a bunch of loaded text and only addresses the concerns of the topic. It describes the research question very nicely and I’m not confused about the author’s goals. Transitions are nice as well. I like that you discuss container interaction among children. It gives a brief introduction to self-detection method for accomplishing content/container manipulation. I know what to expect in rest of the paper. Related Work I like that you address developmental psychology as well as robotics. You give a great description of previous work in the field as it directly relates to your topic. However, I think you could have briefly discussed the goals and purposes of developmental robotics and why it’s preferred over traditional robotics and traditional artificial intelligence. Experimental Setup & Methods You have a good grasp on how you want to conduct this experiment and what methods you’ll use to evaluate the results. The hardware components of the robot are explained thoroughly. The explanation of the experimental containers is also good. Great images are provided. It’s good that you are using different-textured objects and blocks to generate diverse data. Explanation of exploratory behaviors is also good. I really like that you essentially break down all components of the experiment and describe them in a way that the reader can understand. You give a good description of neural networks and how this concept is used in your research. The images are very helpful. Evaluation and Future Work It seems that you are very knowledgeable of how to evaluate the results of the experiment. Ideas for future work are reasonable. ---------------------------- MY CONCLUSION: Overall, the proposal is well-organized and terse. The research question is clearly stated in the introduction. This proposal meets the requirements of the proposed guidelines and it is related to the field of developmental robotics. What I like most about this topic is that it seems to cover all of the principles of developmental robotics as discussed in our readings. There isn’t anything about this project that I dislike. I have no concerns about the difficulty and I think it can be done in the remainder of this semester. My first suggestion is to note that you’ve done previous research with robots and containers or if you have any papers that you use it as one of your references. My second suggestion is for future work. Since you’re non-containers are just the containers flipped upside down, maybe you can do an experiment to see how well the robot can orient and object so that it can be used as a container. Overall this is a fun topic!