Lab Order

In the absence of the course instructor, the TAs have authority over all lab proceedings. This implies that each team member is held to obey their instructions. Students that fail to do so will be expelled from the course (i.e., receive no grade).

Safety (systems dependability) is an important aspect of the code development process, not only to protect the drone equipment, but also to protect the students against unanticipated reactions of the drone. The RPM of the rotors can lead to injury, e.g., as a result of broken rotor parts flying around as a result of a malfunction or crash. Therefore, students who are in the immediate vicinity of the drone must stay out of range and wear goggles.

As mentioned at the course web page, lab attendance by all team members is mandatory for reasons of the importance of the lab in the course context, and also because of team solidarity. Hence, the TAs will at least perform a presence scan at the start and at the end of each lab session. Any team member whose aggregate AWOL (absent without leave) is more than 30 minutes will be automatically expelled from the course.

Although it is logical that team members will specialize to some extent as a result of the team task partitioning, it is crucial that each member fully understands all general concepts of the entire mission. Consequently, each team member is expected to be able to explain to the TAs what each of his/her team members is doing, how it is done, and why it is done. The TAs will regularly monitor each team member’s performance. Team members that display an obvious lack of interest or understanding of team operations risk having their individual grades being lowered or even risk being expelled from the course.

Fraud (as well as aiding to fraud) is a serious offense and will always lead to (1) being expelled from the course and (2) being reported to the EEMCS Examination Board. As part of an active anti-fraud policy, all code must be submitted as part of the demonstrator, and will be subject to extensive cross-referencing in order to hunt down fraud cases. It is NOT allowed to reuse ANY computer code or report text from anyone else, nor to make code or text available to any other student attending CESE4030 (aiding to fraud). An obvious exception is the code that was given to you by the course.

an excuse that one “didn’t fully understand the rules and regulations on student fraud and plagiarism at the Delft Faculty of EEMCS” will be interpreted as an insult to the intelligence of the course instructor and is NOT acceptable.

In case of doubt one is advised to first send a query to the course instructor before acting.

Finally, note that the lab sessions only provide a forum where teams can test their designs using the actual drone hardware. However, these sessions are not enough to successfully perform the assignment. An important part of the team work has to be performed outside lab hours, involving tasks such as having team meetings, designing the software, preparing the lab experiments, and preparing (sections of) the report. In order to enable (limited) experimentation outside lab hours, one flight controller board per team can be made available outside lab hours, once a €50 deposit has been made. The deposit is reimbursed once the board has been returned, and it is established that the board is fully functioning.