Semester 8 Coursework Summary

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Coursework

Table of Contents

Overview

This semester was one of the heaviest project based semesters of my undergraduate experience. Several classes had significant final projects, in junction with my undergraduate capstone, and research. Luckily, several of my classes had significant theoretical overlap with courses taken in previous semesters, making it easier to focus on applications and projects.

ME 4723 - Interdisciplinary Capstone Design

At Georgia Tech, all engineers complete a ‘Capstone Design’ course which is supposed to represent a culmination of the engineering education into a large-scale team based project. Projects can either be self-assigned or teams can bid on projects proposed by companies in industry (often including large companies such as Delta). My team (composed of myself (ME), Dustin Coha (ME), Sathya Gummadi (EE), Sandeepan Mukherjee (ME), and Dillon Wells (ME)) decided to take the CreateX variant of capstone, which focuses heavily on entrepreneurship. A few of my teammates have goals in entrepreneurship, and I personally felt that while my problem-solving skills were quite developed, my problem-finding skills had not been focused on as significantly focused on during my education.

The first month or so of the course focused solely on ideation and problem identification; we conducted hundreds of customer interviews, across many different idea directions, including physical therapy, worker safety, infant safety, and young child safety. Eventually our team settled into the realm of young child safety - many of the parents we talked with recounted wanting to be able to locate their children, in a ‘Life360’ fashion, before their child had a smartphone. We tackled this problem head on, and more can be read about our solution here.

Once the problem had been decided on, the course focused on various startup/entrepreneurship genres. The last month of the course had no lecture, to give extra time to work on prototype development. The content of the course is outlined below:

  • Customer Discovery
  • Business Theses
  • Market Sizing/Landscape Analysis
  • Minimum Viable Products, Go-to-Market Strategy
  • Value Propositions
  • Design Ideation
  • Patent Law
  • Ethics and Integrity
  • Startup Launch

The course is organized with three reports, three presentations, and a few miscellaneous grades including peer and instructor evaluations.

I have organized our engineering progress on the project in a Github repo here and our final report is available here.

ME 4012 - Motion Systems

Motion Systems is a lab course which covers the fundamentals of linear control theory, including:

  • System Modeling Overview
  • System Linearization
  • System Responses (Time Domain, Frequency Domain)
  • Steady State Error
  • Root Locus Techniques, Routh-Horowitz Criterion
  • Loop Shaping Techniques
  • Nyquist Stability Criterion
  • Discrete Control (Bilinear Transforms)
  • Digital Filtering (FIR, IIR)
  • State Space Control (Pole Placement, LQR)
  • State Space Observers (Pole Placement, Kalman Filter)

The course is structured around two midterms, biweekly homework assignments, biweekly lab sections, and a physical final project. The labs work on implementation of topics considered in class on an array of physical systems, including electromagnetic levitation, RCL circuits, segway-robots, and so on. The course does not assume any prior knowledge of mechatronics or coding experience outside of MATLAB, but especially the final project will be difficult if none of the team members have worked with mechatronic systems before, as the course does not instruct on this at all. Luckily, I had taken Mechatronics in a previous semester, and was already up to speed on these topics; I handled most of the mechatronic and coding for our team. A post regarding our final project is available here. If a GT student is looking to take a controls course in ME, I would recommend 4012 over 4452, which deals only with theory. Overall the courses cover the same content, and 4012 moves a bit faster, but has a better layout, labs to get some implementation experience, and a final project which is very fun to complete.

CS 4649 - Robotic Intelligence and Path Planning

This CS course is cross-listed as a graduate course, and covers many topics in search, planning, and optimization relevant to robotic systems, including:

  • State Space Search
  • Probabilistic Search
  • Constraint Satisfaction Problems
  • Motion Planning (RRT, RRT, RRT with dynamics)
  • Markov Decision Processes
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Neural Networks
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning
  • Reasoning with Uncertainty
  • Inferring State with Uncertainty
  • Linear Programming
  • Mixed-Integer Linear Programming
  • Robust Optimization
  • Research Seminars

The course is structured around two midterms, weekly homeworks which include both implementation and theory portions, and a final project in Reconnaissance Blind Multichess, my post for which is available here. The course expanded upon topics which I had previous exposure to in CS 3600 (Artificial Intelligence) and CS 4641 (Machine Learning). Personally, I enjoyed all of these classes, and think taking any of them would be beneficial. Both CS 3600 and CS 4649 use the Russel and Novig textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is perhaps my favorite CS textbook of all time.

APPH 1040 - Scientific Foundations of Health

In an effort to front-load my coursework, I decided freshman year to leave this health class the end of my senior year, to reduce my final coursework load, and provide extra time to work on Capstone and other project. This was a great choice, as completing this class took little effort and time. The course covered various introductory health topics, spanning physical, mental, emotional, and other categories. This class is a Georgia Tech requirement, and is predominantly taken freshman year.

Graduation

This was my last semester at Georgia Tech, and on May 7th, 2022 I graduated with highest honors with a B.S. Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Robotics. If you are interested in my path through this degree, my transcripts are available here.