Robotics Capstone Project

What you'll learn

• Explain the purposes and assessment of a robotics capstone, form a team with lead and backup roles and a working charter, and use rubrics and normalized peer evaluation to plan evidence and reflect on contribution.
• Frame a problem statement and operational design domain, map stakeholders by power and interest, and write measurable, prioritized and traceable system requirements with verification methods.
• Generate and compare robot concepts using functional decomposition, morphological charts, Pugh screening and weighted decision matrices, test the robustness of decisions with sensitivity analysis, and reduce key uncertainties with spikes.
• Develop a system architecture with independent safety paths and an interface control document, maintain power, mass, computing and other budgets with contingency and margin, and prepare for and respond to SRR, PDR and CDR.
• Plan a 13-week robotics project with a work breakdown structure, three-point estimates, critical path and project buffer, run hybrid agile delivery, track progress with velocity and earned value, and manage code with Git, continuous integration and decision records.
• Build and bench-test mechanical, electrical and software subsystems to their interfaces using appropriate prototype fidelity, safe power and emergency-stop design, simulation and held-out datasets, and manage a bill of materials with landed cost, lead times and spares.
• Integrate a robot incrementally in threads with entry and exit criteria, manage clock synchronization and percentile latency budgets in a ROS 2 system, debug systematically and keep an integration log.
• Plan verification and validation with the V-model, choose sample sizes with the success-run theorem, report binary results with Wilson intervals, use simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, controlled and field tests, and run regression testing and user validation.
• Conduct a proportionate safety and ethics review with a hazard log, FMEA, risk exposure tracking and test safety plans, and address privacy, research ethics under TCPS 2, wildlife protection and social impacts.
• Plan and rehearse a timed demonstration with fallbacks, produce an honest demonstration video, write a traceable and reproducible technical report and user documentation, and hand over a licensed repository.
• Identify the intellectual property a capstone creates and who owns it, manage disclosure and patent decisions with CIPO and grace-period rules, evaluate venture potential, and identify Canadian funding programs and robotics competitions.
• Reflect specifically on project experience, run an evidence-based retrospective, build a portfolio, résumé bullets and STAR interview stories from the capstone, and describe robotics career paths and the route to P.Eng. licensure.