Week #1: Let's Try Something New

1. New subjects

Welcome back, reader, to this journey that has already spanned 3 challenges and is moving on to the last one of this first year of the master's degree. Yet again, a new set of course units awaits us and, along with them, new topics to cover.

For this challenge, the course units that will accompany are Multi-Agent Systems and Intelligent Environments.

The former, as the name suggests, covers the field of multi-agent systems, a specific field of artificial intelligence that aims to take advantage of social concepts such as communication, cooperation and negotiation between agents in order to simulate, control and monitor complex real systems.

The latter covers both IoT and Robotics, and how both can be integrated in order to provide the environments that surround us with the intelligence and adaptability that has become expected, given the prevalent presence of technology in our lives.

2. Project ideas

Having analysed and understood the subjects covered by both course units, the team started discussing ideas for this challenge that covered all of them, with the following being the most discussed: Autonomous Restaurant or Autonomous Clothes Store.

In short, the idea in both cases is to have robots managing the restaurant/store and executing the tasks that would normally be expected from human employees. The main motivation to replace humans by robots is to result in a more efficient workflow, as robots can ideally be more organized and plan their tasks better than most humans, while also not having to deal with factors such as stress and stamina.

Naturally, both ideas present their pros and cons, although the team agrees that whichever route is taken, there are a vast amount of topics to cover and to result in a rich and interesting project. Despite this, the team is slightly more inclined towards the autonomous restaurant, as it covers a subdomain of retail that the team has not really explored in the past challenges and it would be interesting to do so.

Next week, these ideas will be presented to the professors, with the team expecting their feedback to ease the choice.