← Back to Robotics & Embodied AI
High School Capstone⏱ 5–8 hours
Design an Autonomous System
Engineer a full robot system: perception, planning, control, safety.
Your mission
Design a complete autonomous system on paper — every layer from sensing to safety — for a real-world robotics challenge.
What you'll need
- A design document or slides
- Research on real robots doing similar tasks
- Diagramming tools
Your step-by-step plan
Specify the mission
Define the task, the environment, and what success and failure look like.
Design perception
Choose the sensor suite and explain how the robot builds a model of its world.
Plan control and motion
Describe how it plans paths and controls movement, including under uncertainty.
Engineer safety
Identify failure modes and design a safeguard for each one.
Make it yours
- Add how the system would learn and improve over time.
- Compare your design to a real robot that exists today.
How you'll know you succeeded
- Every layer from sensing to safety is designed.
- Failure modes are named with safeguards.
- The design is grounded in how real robots work.