Venue: ESPC 2022 Competition

Reviews:

final_score: rating: 3: Accept. This work can be presented during the event, but it is not a contender to win the competition.
review_content: summary: The author has presented the process to speed up the robot.
strengths: 1. There are a lot of scope for this project
2. The designs and the script are made opensource. It will be useful for others to explore
weaknesses: 1. Should have included narration during video demonstration.
review_title: null

final_score: rating: 4: Accept + Potential Winner. This work can be presented and it is a strong contender to win this competition.
review_content: summary: This is a contending for winning the competition because it addresses the general need for improved robotic services. An added strength is the ability to communicate with the robot car and its low-cost modular approach to environmental sensing.  The team provided a full solution with a controllable vehicle able to map the area is covered.  The use case should be better designed and validated. There needs to be extra step needed to validate that the floor is even or that the robot can map noise levels in an office. The current solution is not too distinct from a robot car toy. It would be more desirable to design a more advanced robot cleaner with easier manoeuvrability and with obstacle avoidance;  that can sense and map the area  it covers. Promising work.    
strengths: Sensors on wheels first objective is to design a robot car to speed-up a process of measuring different quantities in multiple points of an area. The main strength of the proposal is that is gives two real-world applications: to verify the floor evenness, when the apartments are ready; to inspect of the noise level and air quality in different places of a workspaces such as offices. The second objective is to map the area and provide a visualisation. 

This is novel work and appears to have been achieved during the competition time frame which is a strength. 

There is a potential market for robot cars to reduce manual tasks. The immediate example is the robotic vacuum cleaner, a simple cleaning solution which market size was valued at USD 2.56 billion in 2019.  Therefore, it is viable, to design more innovation in this area. 

The prototype is well described, the vehicle appears to be robust, and the solution achieves the general goal.  The work included designing and implementation the hardware and software builds. The robot can receive and send basic messages to the server application. The team addressed and overcame many technical problems.

With further work, building, testing and evaluation, this can be an invention disclosure for the team.  

weaknesses: There could be an evolution of robotic vacuum cleaners which have overcome many practical problems such as obstacle avoidance. The team could have hacked an existing robotic cleaner and added the newer functionality  (sensing, communication and map visualisation). The current robot car design requires turning and other driving manoeuvres to map the room. However, the car design is applicable in more rough terrain, such as outside and sloping areas.         

It would be good to focus on a main use case and provide a winning solution. If the goal is to map floor evenness then it is best to adapt the design accordingly. It is good to have modular approach but it can lead to dilution when thinking of the product evolution.
review_title: null

final_score: rating: 3: Accept. This work can be presented during the event, but it is not a contender to win the competition.
review_content: summary: The project tries to solve the speed-up problem of processing of measuring different quantities in multiple points of an area and data visualization for collected data. 
strengths: 1. The prototype works and has great potential to improve for environmental monitoring. The project is interesting.
2. The documents are open resources and could be used by others to repeat those experiments.


weaknesses: 1. The language needs to be improved.
2. It is not so clear how the authors speed-up the processing. 
3. The experiment and testing part needs more evaluation, such as how the size of the room affect the performance. 
4. It would be useful that authors could be addressed how the work could be extended and how those measurements could be further used to service the users/customers.
5. If this process could be made automatically, it will make the work more useful.
review_title: null

final_score: rating: 3: Accept. This work can be presented during the event, but it is not a contender to win the competition.
review_content: summary: The authors build a platform that enables sensors to be placed on a moving remote controlled device.
strengths: - The problem is important to the community, and the solution can be built upon to make a viable product. 
- The authors have a working prototype. 
- The design schemas are made available (open source), and this can help others to build on the insights of the authors. The readme files are sufficiently detailed (but there is scope for improvement in the documentation). 

weaknesses: - Writing style needs to be improved. Try to use an active voice instead of passive voice for reports. Please try to make time to read  Elements of Style "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style". Also, try to do a spell check before submitting the report.
-  Some description on the design choices is missing. Along with stating what is done, it would be interesting to know why it was done. For instance, why was MQTT chosen? Also, please elaborate on acronyms for people not working in the same area as you. For instance, what is ESP Library?  
- The video could have been longer with details of the various components used, the various ways in which they addressed the challenges, and some examples of corner cases where the solution fails would have been useful. For instance, if the authors are not comfortable speaking, then they could have annotated the video to tell us what is happening in the video. 
- There is limited discussion on how this solution can be extended. For example, it would be interested to see how this could be automated by using lidar based sensors to navigate the robot.
review_title: null

final_score: rating: 3: Accept. This work can be presented during the event, but it is not a contender to win the competition.
review_content: summary: The first problem which was tried to solve is to speed-up a process of measuring different parameters in multiple points of an area. The second problem is the collected data visualization.
strengths: Although not novel, the problem is Interesting in using mobile sensors to collect data.  The demo is good. Could have been better with narration
weaknesses: 1. The writing of the report needs considerable improvement. Hardly any formatting, Repetition of statements verbatim. 
2. Demo does not have an audio or text explanation. 
3. Block diagram is missing.
4. As mentioned in the report, a better way is to have an automated car instead of the remotely controlled car for such an application. 
5. Not sure how this is achieving the two objectives of the project: speeding the data collection (no comparison is presented), and the visualization (a very bare minimum visualization is there). A simple interpolation could have been tried. 
6. Not sure why this is called a robot, this is mostly a remotely controlled car.
review_title: null

Decision: Accept