Informatics students showcase their projects to applause from industry experts

The System Design Project course is a group project for third year Computer Science students.

SDP’s history predates the establishment of the School of Informatics and it’s more than a taught course, it’s an institution within Informatics. The system to be designed in the project has varied over the years from robot shopping through mars lander, robot mine clearance, robot football to assistive robotics. The System Design Project is intended to give students practical experience of:  building a large scale system, working as members of a team and documentation and presentation of a project.

This year's task was to design and build an assistive robot device and its corresponding software interface. Students were divided in 20 groups of 7 or 8 and worked together towards self-proposed goals. They developed a great variety of fantastic projects for a variety of domains, such as hospitals, offices and warehouses.

SDP Final Day took place on the 6th of April. Each project produced a demo and a trade fair stand which were assessed by external judges from industry (e.g. Google, Amazon, Accenture, KAL, Sky).

The judging panel was very impressed by the quality of the work. At the end of the Final Day a variety of prizes were awarded to the projects:

SDP results

Best Overall Project

Group: Lambda R (robot suitcase)

Best Technical Project

Group: Pour_it (drink dispensing robot)

Best Presentation

Group: Brobots (autonomous tidying robot)

Runners-up

Group: !Spam (automated mail delivery robot) Group: Sweep (connected-home cleaning robot) Group: Kallisti (automated indoor mapping robot)

Technical Innovation Prize

Group: Team RoboTour (interactive museum guide system)

Students' Choice Prize

Group: TrashED (autonomous robot aimed to collect and sort garbage)