Walking around Dubrovnik

This pair of assignments was developed for a cross-listed (undergrad + MS-level) Intro to AI taught as part of a semester-long study abroad in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The city is built on a large hill (and some smaller ones), such that many so-called "streets" are in fact stairs. As such, the time it takes to walk a path in one direction may be significantly different than in the other direction. This inspired the development of an A* assignment for pedestrians. In particular, developing a cost function and appropriate (admissible) heuristic given that cost function require a bit of care.

Lab 1:When assigned, students were given about three weeks for the first assignment. The goal of this assignment is to write an A* path planner that uses appropriate cost function and heuristics for pedestrians in an urban, hilly environment. Students are given a little starter code (and could easily be given more to be able to spend time focusing on the AI aspects, though my students enjoyed the diversion of playing with the GUI).

Lab 2 prep:To prepare for lab 2, students were given the assignment to start collecting data (that is, going for walks and timing themselves). They had several weeks to do this. Credit was given as part of lab 2 for collecting sufficient quantities of unique data.

Lab 2: For the second assignment, students were again given about three weeks from the time the material was covered in class. In this assignment, students use the data collected by walking around to modify the planner's cost functions, using different types of regression.

Localization:To localize this assignment to another setting, you will need to generate two data files: an OpenStreetMap XML of the routes, and an elevation map.

The student data used as the data set for part 2 was collected via a web form with trivial PHP inside - if you choose to collect data this way you will need to be able to put it on a web server with appropriate permissions. Otherwise, any survey tool should be able to serve the same purpose easily enough (the provided form does no input validation in any case).