Thesis Topic

I've been hard at work trying to find a specific topic for my senior thesis lately, but I realized something. While some of the applications of swarm intelligence seem interesting, they don't seem fun. This is one time where I can choose nearly any topic I want to work on, and I want to really enjoy what I'm doing. Therefore, I decided to change my decision on something I dismissed early on when searching for my project - I actually do want to work on a project that involves some hardware or microelectronics.

I had originally dismissed the idea of doing anything with microelectronics because I'd never done it before. However, I've never done most of the stuff I would be using for my project anyway - part of the project would be to learn these skills. Working with hardware and making something tangible seems much more interesting to me than just running a simulation or applying swarm intelligence ideas to some existing algorithm; it seems like it would be fun.

Based off this new change of plans, I have two main ideas for projects:

1. Create a few small robots, who can work together somehow to accomplish a goal. I would be using some ideas from swarm intelligence and swarm robotics here, and applying them to actual hardware.
2. One of my CS professors got one of these to fly around in my building at Willamette during our weekly CS Tea meetings. I think it would be awesome to get this thing to fly around on its own, and if I get that working, even get it to do something like be able to fly from one point in the building to another, or recognize faces, or practically anything else. This would be moving away from my initial idea of a swarm intelligence type project, but I would still be applying many ideas from Artificial Intelligence.

Both of these projects seem really interesting, and fun, and I think I would be able to accomplish something significant with them. It may not be groundbreaking new research, but it would be a great learning experience, and I might even end up doing something that hasn't been done before, or at least not in the same exact way. If I could find a specific task to give the small robots, I think that might be a really interesting project, and if I am able to accomplish it quickly, I could always get them to do something more complicated. Maybe have them start by finding some object, and then having them all huddle together around it?

All in all, I think that I will have a lot more fun and be a lot more motivated to work on one of these projects than one in the area I was thinking about before. Both of these projects would still involve looking at previous research (and some other sources) and they can still probably be considered research, especially if I do something that hasn't been done in the same way before.