The course consists of 16 lectures, 3 voluntary labs and 3 obligatory individual projects. The idea is that the lectures and lab sessions will introduce the tools necessary to solve the projects. Each of the three projects covers one part of the course: programming in Matlab, C and C++. The theme for the projects is robotics. For example, we will develop methods for path planning with probabilistic road maps or control of robot manipulator arms.

During the course, we will use BILDA for all communication. You can find there the latest news and announcements, course schedule in the ICal/VCal format and a student forum. You should also submit your project assignments via BILDA.

Andrzej Pronobis, es.htk@sibonorp

The examination of the course is in the form of projects. There are three obligatory individual projects to be solved before specific deadlines and passed during the project exam sessions (20 min meeting with the lecturer). All three projects need to be passed to complete the course. The final course grade will be either Pass or Fail.

The labs are intended to give a hands-on experience and help to set you up for doing the projects. You are encouraged to work on the labs together to learn from each other and discuss problems. As the background knowledge between participants usually varies much, you are encouraged to explore on your own and discuss in groups. You can download lab instructions below:

• Lab 1 - Matlab
• Lab 2 - C
• Lab 3 - C++

During the course, three help sessions will be organized to help you with practical programming problems. Attending the help sessions is not obligatory but highly recommended.

With the projects you are supposed to show that you have grasped and understood the material presented in the course and show that you can make proper use of the programming languages in order to solve a task. The projects are to be undertaken individually. You can download the project instructions below:

• Project 1 - Matlab
• Project 2 - C
• Project 3 - C++

In order to pass the project exam:

• You need to submit a solution to the project (source files) using Bilda. The solution needs to be submitted before the project deadline in order to be able to approach the project exam session. Deadlines can be found here.
• There are three project exam sessions, one for each project in: Matlab, C and C++. During your presentations you should be able to answer questions, general and specific, regarding the methodologies applied. The project will be graded: Pass or Fail. Upon failure you may be requested to complement the project and present it once again.

An additional fourth re-exam session will be organized at the end of the course.

The following criteria must be satisfied in order to pass the project examination:

• Completeness of the submitted project solution
  • In order to be allowed for the project examination, the student must submit a code implementing a complete solution to the problem.
• Correctness of results
  • The program should generate correct results. Minor bugs can be tolerated (e.g. a small error in an equation) as long as they do not prevent from evaluation of the other criteria. 
• Understanding of the submitted code
  • The student must be able to show that he understands the code submitted and justify the implementation and design decisions.
• Understanding the lecture material
  • The student must be able to answer questions about the majority of the material presented in the lectures.

In order to pass, the majority of the following criteria must be satisfied:

• Quality and style of the code
  • Code should be well documented and follow standard coding conventions. It should be easy to read.
• Structure of the code
  • Code should be well structured into files, scripts, functions, classes (for C++) and follow the principles of Object Oriented Programming (OOP, for C++).
• Optimal use of language constructs
  • Code should use the available language constructs and tools to solve problems optimally.
• Quality of visualizations
  • Result visualizations (especially in case of Matlab) should be clearly readable.

• Introductory materials
  • Matlab Video Tutorial
  • Matlab Primer - Getting started guide
  • An Introduction to Matlab - Dundee
• Reference manuals
  • Complete Matlab Online Documentation
• Forums
  • StackOverflow Matlab - A great place to ask questions and find solutions to problems with Matlab.

• Online courses
  • WiBi.net - Programming in C - Video course
• Books
  • C Programming WikiBook - A pretty good e-book with a lot of useful general information about programming in C.
• Tutorials
  • Pointers and arrays in C - Nice tutorial explaining some of the concepts difficult for C beginners
• Coding conventions and style guides
  • Coding Conventions - About coding conventions in general (IMPORTANT!). Contains many links to various coding style guides for different languages.
  • Coding Conventions for C from the C Programming WikiBook - First place to look to learn about various C coding conventions.
• Reference manuals
  • C/C++ Reference - Language and library reference for both C and C++.
  • C/C++ Library Reference - Convenient library reference for both C and C++.
• Forums
  • StackOverflow C - A great place to ask questions and find solutions to problems with C.

• Online courses
  • WiBi.net - Programming in C++ - Video course
  • WiBi.net - Introduction To Object Oriented Programming - Video course about OO programming
• Books
  • C++ Programming WikiBook - A pretty good e-book with a lot of useful geneal information about C++ (coding styles, comparisons to C and other languages etc.).
• Coding conventions and style guides
  • Coding style conventions from the C++ Programming WikiBook - A nice overview of C++ coding style conventions.
  • Google C++ Style Guide - A nice coding style guide developed and used at Google.
  • C++ Programming Style Guidelines by Geotechnical Software Services - Another nice style guide.
• Forums
  • StackOverflow C++ -  A great place to ask questions and find solutions to problems with C++.

• Beginners guides to Linux
  • Introduction to Linux - A concise guide with the most useful stuff.
  • Linux Newbie Guide - A more "complete" guide for beginners.
• Emacs
  • Editing Files with Emacs - A short tutorial on basic Emacs usage
  • Run the interactive Emacs tutorial: start emacs, click on Emacs Tutorial
• Make and Makefiles
  • Makefile Tutorial - A tutorial discussing the the fundamentals of writing Makefiles (pretty much as much as is needed for the course) 

The following books can be also helpful, but you are not obliged to use them:

• "Matlab for Engineers Explained", F. Gustafsson och N. Bergman, Springer Verlag, 2003 (ISBN 1-85233-697-8)
• "C Programming Language (2nd Edition)", Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie, Prentice Hall, 1988

In order to provide an identical environment for all students working on the C and C++ projects, an Ubuntu virtual machine was prepared in VirtualBox. The VM has all the required tools preinstalled (gcc/g++/emacs/SDL etc.) and will be used to run the submitted project code for grading. You can download a RAR compressed VirtualBox VM here.

To use the virtual machine, download and install VirtualBox. Then, download and unpack the virtual machine and add it to VirtualBox using Machine->Add. To exchange files between the virtual machine (guest operating system) and your OS (host OS), use shared folders. More information about VirtualBox can be found here.