Proposal number:  16
Should this proposal be considered for the Best Proposal prize?  No.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall organization/clarity of the proposal? 8/10
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall project idea? 9/10

Feedback:

	I enjoyed reading your proposal.  In the interest of developmental robotics, your idea has some good application, and to me, your project appears to be an attempt to bridge the
gap between the theoretical approaches of object affordances, and real world “perception’ - if you want to call it that.  It’s interesting how, in this class, we’ve read so many
papers based on affordances where a robot interacts with objects and uses some interesting mathematical way to represent the results in the context of a publishable paper. 
Furthermore, the papers that I have read that use the information that they gather toward robots functionality are extremely task specific.  For these reasons, it was refreshing
to read your proposal.  It looks like a great way to substitute a relatively low cost, standard piece of equipment (the android phone, and the applications that you described),
into the “robot town” scenario, to create an environment interfacing system.  Further along in the project, if you were to have a robot chassis, could you still control it with
your android phone?  If so, it would be beneficial to the scientific community because it would be based on something widely used by the general public.  I would also imagine
android phones would be easily obtainable in a few years when current technology deems them obsolete.
	Some of the ideas above describe my favorite aspects of the paper.  It seems to focus a lot about finding a general way to classify an environment and use a robot to interact
with that environment.  This has relevance when considering tricky problems such as identifying objects and navigation, and seems to fit into the idea of creating an autonomous
house working robot that so many companies are trying to create.  Lastly, I like how you plan to simulate the environment using a system of easy identification. (barcodes in your
case)  It seems to be a good way to work with environment interaction without the need of visual input explored in so many other papers.  The idea of these identifiers is also my
least favorite aspect of your proposal because it seems to be the limiting factor in the generalization of the project.  Effectively, you are putting a label on everything in
order to enable its interaction with your ‘robot.’  However, I understand that object recognition is not what your project is about, and I also understand the necessity to have
such a recognition system for your project to be successful.
I thought that you did a great job fitting your project into the proposal guidelines when it comes to explaining your approach, background, previous approaches, and the general
layout of your project plan.  In reading your proposal, I ended up with a good understanding of the scenario that you were trying to produce and the methods that you plan to use. 
You did a good job of relating the equipment available to you with their counterparts used in the previous implementations described in the previous work.  This was a good way to
organize your approach to best explain your procedure.  Towards the end of your proposal, I wish there was a more detailed explanation of a few of points made on the proposal
guidelines.  Your definition of success is very clear, and you explain a lot of information regarding your test conditions and subjects in the body of your approach, however, it
would have been nice to get a more detailed look at the environment and how you plan to improve.  I listed a couple points and questions below.

1. You are using your house as the test environment and embedding barcodes in different places and objects inside the house.  It would be nice to have an actual floor plan of your
house, a list of how many objects you plan to tag, or a map of the procedure taking place in this environment.  Without this information, I have an unclear idea of the size of the
experiment.

2. You mention some useful technology that should be available within the year.  How can these advancements be better implemented when they become available?  How can you use the
results of your current project to better use the upcoming advancements?

	One concern that I have with your project is the human interaction factor.  (Specifically, page 5 of your approach)  You state that you don’t have access to a robot, so a human
will substitute for the motor control system.  I wish you were a bit clearer about your intentions here because it was hard for me to get a concise understanding of what aspects
of your experiment are in the physical world and what was not.  Also, in the world of science, it’s a good rule of thumb to keep human interaction in an experiment to a minimum. 
I am not concerned about this aspect for the purposes of this course, but the project is all about simulating a real research project.  In the real world, you may get negative
feedback from fellow scientists regarding the validity of your results based your human influence.  In the future, you may benefit from doing some research on a simple robot
chassis.  For instance, you could buy a simple sumo fighting robot kit for about $50, and modify it to interface with your phone.  Even a couple of servos modified for continuous
rotation, wheels, and a digital PWM control system would suffice without burning a hole in your pocket.

	The overall clarity of the paper could use some work.  I didn’t really get a firm grasp on the project until reading it a few times.  It sounds like you have a lot of experience
coding and working with data interfacing.  It felt like the proposal lacked some of the basic information that makes it understandable to an audience with your specific expertise. 
Because of this, it felt like you jumped straight into the details of your proposal, and in some instances, it took a lot of thinking to understand your meaning.  It may be
helpful to begin some of the major components of the proposal with just a paragraph explaining the overall approach so ‘bozos’ like me can better understand your path.  This would
have been especially helpful in your “approach” section.  If you would have added a small generalization of your procedure before explaining its details, it would have helped with
some confusion down the road.  Beside this point of introduction, the organization of your paper was very strong.
This project appears to be very intense and involved.  Furthermore, it looks like a lot of coding and development required before the experiment can be carried out, but in my
opinion, you have found a good balance between project complexity and doing meaningful work.  Though involved, the project doesn’t seem too difficult to carry out in the remaining
time in this course given that you have sufficient knowledge in developing the tools that you will use in this project.  The cool thing about this project is that it can be made
as complicated as desired just by expanding on your environment and commands.  It is also interesting that the generalization of your project may use some technologies not yet
available as explained in the report, but the proof of concept will provide a foundation for more involved applications of the project.  For example, I can imagine a robot which
identifies certain aspects of its environment with the ‘tags’ that you employ, manipulates those objects to develop its own data on affordances, and can carry out simple commands
based on that information, all on a simple interfacing system. 

	One last note:  Overall, the proposal is very well written, however, if you go back and read it for yourself; you may find some small word or editing mistakes in the writing.  I
came across a few of these throughout your proposal.  It’s not in any way a hindrance, but in a real project proposal, your reviewers may get the wrong idea in regards to the
professionalism put forth in your proposal.

	One interesting addition to this project could be to simulate the manipulation and movement of objects.  If such a robot described in your paper is made for daily household
activity, the information such as location, state, or position stored in the robots memory may be different if the owner interacted with the objects without the robots knowledge. 
It would be interesting to see some kind of active learning application be developed to cope with this, and also those characteristics such as what objects are prone to be moved,
and probable locations of those objects.
This is a really cool project.  I look forward to learning more towards the end of the semester.