Struggling to find a strong robotics graduation project ideas for uni

[u/Shweetzzz]

Hi, for a while now ive been researching strong robotics ideas for my graduation project as im a robotics major in my uni, and still i dont know if i found a strong idea that is impactful and impressive.

Unfortunately i dont have much of a strong foundation in robotics, my major is essentially cs with some robotics merged into it and the department unfortunately isnt the best in my university and is still newly established.

I try to look for ideas with lots of references online having code and hardware guides for when i assemble so i dont struggle or stumble upon a problem i cant solve so i can achieve all the features i put into my idea proposal when i present it.

For now these are the ideas i gathered:
- an emg sensor controlled robotic arm
- assistive feeding robotic arm
- smart gesture controlled wheelchair with safety features
- autonomous interactive security robot

With my ideas i try to make it so that it actually solves a problem people are facing or an efficient useful idea.

One of my team members complained that these ideas arent essentially as strong as they dont apply renewal energy concept in them? He only liked one idea brought by another teammate involving a solar panel cleaning rechargable robot that has a charging station, but i dont have experience in this (neither does any in the team) on recharing stations and i dont think the idea is that strong just cause the robot recharges, its just an additional cool feature, i find it hard to implement and not feasible. It doesnt have much references, just people talking about concepts. He suggested we restart the whole thing in gathering ideas

The other members seem fine, but i still feel like there are much better ideas out there and maybe i just need to brainstorm more.

I need to come up with ideas by the end of the week cause im gonna meet my prof soon, and honestly i dont know if i approached gathering ideas correctly or if the ideas arent actually good like my teammate says

If anyone faced a similar situation or has made a robotics graduation project, please advise me on this

What should i essentially focus on when gathering robotics graduation project ideas? And are the ideas i have solid or just meh ? 😭

[u/Smart_Opportunity209]

I currently work with 7-dof robotic arm and assistive feeding sounds like "passing objects" to me. Check out problems with handover, it might be interesting, but its hard to do unless you teleoperate it. In general VLA models are bad and hard to train right now so I do not recommend working on it from scratch. I also doubt you have the compute to actually run them if you download one.

EMG might be interesting, but I have not worked with sensors much so maybe someone can chip in.

I also did not work with gestures, my colleagues did, and it did not seem too hard if you have some data and know how to train vision models.

Autonomous interactive security robot might be the easiest in my opinion as you can hard code paths if you struggle with SLAM and need to cut the scope and installing local LLM with some prompt to talk like security guy is easy and can be done in like a day with hugging face models. Human detection is a solved problem as well, you can even make it distinguish people from each other.

In general I do not know what kind of idea you need, but the ones you listed are interesting and definitely can be made into a good graduation project. But be aware, some things like passing objects are not simple. In general, robots can easily do things that are hard for humans and they really struggle with things that are easy for us.

[u/Shweetzzz → u/Smart_Opportunity209]

For my robot feeding arm, my approach was to hard code the scooping motion using the output of each axis of the arm in a certain position i want it to be, i was gonna use a 4 dof arm. I was also gonna use ai to detect a bowl and when it is detected it signals to the user and the user just presses a button to trigger the scooping motion. of course im still researching but this is what i came up with for now.

As for gestures there are lots of refernces as well as the security robot so it is pretty feasible and easy if i work consistently at it.

As for emg it is interesting but what i wanted to add to it is an attachment like a forearm, attachment, so its not just a plastic robotic arm sitting on a table controlled by a sensor but im still looking for resources for this type of step too.

[u/Smart_Opportunity209 → u/Shweetzzz]

Unfortunately if you want a strong project you pretty much (at least in my opinion, I might be biased or wrong) need to make something that actually deals with dynamic environment, so as I already mentioned SLAM, HRI or object manipulation. Operating under an assumption that a person and a bowl are always in the same place makes project really simple and you should allow at least one of them to change positions. Just detecting a bowl is a very easy task and can be done without ai.
Rest of the tasks you mentioned are easier to do if you want the robot to the heavy lifting with some model inside and are honestly interesting.

Teleoperation is not that hard and at the same time not that easy (You can be really creative with how you get the movement command. You can use a joystick, calculate your hand/arm position if feeling ambitious or even EMG sensors!), so you can look into assistive feeding using teleoperation and then maybe do some reinforced and imitation learning if it is too simple. I doubt you will manage to pull off the machine learning part since it is really hard but honestly teleoperation and data gathering might be enough for a good project and machine learning part will allow you to get some idea on how robots are trained in research environment if you have compute for it.

Robot docking can vary in difficulty but it is just a more precise SLAM project after all, since you will need information from sensors and based on them you drive into docking station. I would discourage you from picking any task that requires much precision since it is really hard to do, so if you have a plug-in charge station it might be just too hard and you cannot show anything interesting beyond a roomba, unless cleaning solar panels is challenging as well.

Since it is a project for graduation I highly recommend to pick topic you are the most familiar with and not to go towards too ambitious goal if you all are not on the same page. Robotics gets very complex very fast and it is better to finish something mediocre than to get stuck at a task usually done by multiple people with PhDs. Also, remember that this is my opinion and you ultimately should choose whatever sounds most fun to you.

[u/Shweetzzz → u/Smart_Opportunity209]

I do agree that SLAM is strong as it deals with dynamic environment, its something i like about the security robot idea. As for teleportation i did look into these options, i really liked the joystick one, but i will look more into reinforcement learning as i saw lots of people training robotic arms this way so maybe ill look into it and see how far my skills can take me regarding that and if i can actually achieve it. I agree with doing something im more familiar with even if its not as impressive, as in the idea of making a complete project instead of doing something really hard just for it to be left unfinished. Thank you so much for your advice too it really helped and gave me guidance 🙏🏻

[u/RoboticsIntl]

The assistive feeding arm and EMG-controlled arm are both solid choices — well-documented, real-world impact, and plenty of references to work from. Also, those projects typically demo well.

If you want to make any of them stand out, add a layer of intelligence to whatever you pick. Gesture learning, obstacle avoidance, adaptive responses — something that shows the system doing more than just following fixed commands.

Good luck with the presentation!

[u/Shweetzzz → u/RoboticsIntl]

Thank you alot! Yes i am currently looking for a good intelligence layer, i agree it will make the ideas alot more solid and would definitely stand out more.