Communications project

The course will teach students both technical and project management skills which are essential in developing, designing, and prototyping practical systems where the underlying challenges fall in on or multiple areas with a focus on communication, signal processing, AI, and Robotics.

The primary goal of this course is to give students hands-on experience with solving real-world challenges by working in teams to program different hardware platforms and ultimately build their own projects. The overall structure of the course will consist of a few introductory lectures at the beginning to introduce the project and research areas in wireless radar sensing, communication, computer vision, robotics, and reinforcement learning. The students will have time to go through the background material needed for the course and get familiar with the hardware and sensor platforms. Students will then organize into groups of 3 or 4 and propose their project using one or more of the provided hardware platforms, with the aid of the course staff. Finally, students will design and build their own project.

This class has two types of lectures.

(1) In person lectures which are limited to three lectures at the beginning of the semester. After which the lecture time will be used as office hours to help students with their projects.

1. Lecture 1: Class Introduction
2. Lecture 2: Introduction to Wireless Communications & Sensing
3. Lecture 3: Introduction to Reinforcement Learning & Robotics

(2)Online lectures on background material.

1. Wireless Communication
2. Radar Signal Processing
3. Reinforcement Learning

The class will support 3 hardware platforms which students can work with.

• Millimeter Wave TI AWR1443BOOST Radars
• BladeRF 2.0 micro xA4 Software Defined Radios
• Turtlebot 4 Lite

We have two additional robots which students can use. However, we do not provide support for these robots and we only have one available from each type.

• Unitree Go 2 EDU
• MyAGV