1. Proposal number: 13 “Dropping Disks on Pegs” by Adam Campbell 2. Should this proposal be considered for the Best Proposal prize? no 3. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall organization/clarity of the proposal? 4 4. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall project idea? 6 Then write 2-3 pages of helpful feedback to the proposal's author(s). The following questions should help you organize your feedback: * Overall, is the proposal clear, concise, and well-organized? The proposal is relatively clear with regards to motivation and method. The writing style, however, seems a bit too personal. Also, some of the behavior exploration routines proposed for the robot need to be explained more precisely and in much more detail. * Does the proposal meet the posted proposal guidelines? The related work section doesn’t seem to be all that related. The robotics research cited in this proposal deals with the tower of hanoi game, but not with other developmental approaches in which robots learn to manipulate objects. While there may not be other papers specifically addressing the task in this proposal, there are still many related ones. For example, Shane Griffith’s publication on categorizing containers comes to mind. Details regarding the algorithms and code libraries to be used are also missing. The proposal should provide some background on how the sensory feedback data recorded from the exploration trials will be analyzed. * How does the project idea fit within the framework of Developmental Robotics? This project addresses a manipulation problem using several principles of developmental robotics. First, the robot’s representation will be grounded in its own experience with the world. Second, the project proposal also indicates that the robot will perform behaviors that verify the outcome of its previous action. The task is itself is a manipulation task often performed by infants. * Describe what you like BEST and LEAST about the project idea. My favorite part of this proposal is the overall approach to solving the task - rather then pre-programming the robot to put the disk at a specific location, the robot will explore the objects and learn for itself what works and what doesn’t. I also like the aspect of detecting success and failure by performing subsequent behaviors on the peg. The least that I like about this proposal is that it could have been written much better. * Do you have any concerns about the project? The only concern I have is whether one person would be able to write all the code to process the robot’s sensory data. * Does it seem doable in the remaining time? Yes. * Does it seem too difficult? It doesn’t seem easy. * Are there any major details left out? Yes, many. How are the individual sensory motor data from each trial going to be represented? For example, many of the papers presented in class had a specific notation - such details are missing from this proposal. * Does the idea rely upon technologies that are not currently available? No. * Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Do you have any suggestions for related work that should be cited? One suggestion would be to expand the experimental setup to include several different pegs and/or disks, such that not all possible pairs can fit together (e.g., some pegs might be too thick for some disks, etc.). If the robot explores several combination, it would be able to detect which ones work and which ones don’t, based on the different types of outcomes with each pair. Furthermore, if the robot can perceive the thickness of the peg roughly from its visual sense, than it could perhaps learn a model that can estimate whether a given peg and disk could work together. My suggestion for the project proposal author is to read the papers by Griffith et al dealing with containers - in those paper, the robot explored the objects in a similar manner, by dropping a puck randomly over containers and non-containers. Other work from Stoytchev lab that is also relevant includes the study by Ritika Sahai on writing, since in that experiment, the robot was also studying how two different objects relate to each other. For example, if the peg is too thick, the robot should be able to find out that the disk never goes on it and perhaps predict whether a new peg will be too thick based on observation in the visual field. A final suggestion for the author is to spend more time on the writing. The proposal could have been much better if it had been proof read and edited a few more times. The layout and the positions of the figures is also pretty bad and can hopefully be fixed before the final write up is submitted.