Lessons Learnt From Scenario-Based Integration

From the very start the CoSy project set out to demonstrate and evaluate its progress in implemented, integrated systems. Chapters 9 & 10 set out both the two scenarios we chose to integrate around, and the contributions we made by studying problems following an integrative, rather than isolationist, methodology. However, these contributions did not come without a cost. Following an integrated systems methodology (and therefore delivering a genuinely integrated project) demands a large input in terms of person hours, a demand which is regularly underestimated in the planning phase (both of whole projects and of development cycles). In CoSy we put in an extremely large amount of time and effort into the “integration process.” At some point or other almost everyone associated with the project wrote code that was used in a demonstrator system. From undergraduates and masters students, to postgrads and postdocs, up to PIs and other faculty members, we all bought into the collective ingenuity or insanity required to produce a state-of-the-art intelligent robot. It is rare that so many people from so many different disciplines work together to integrate at this scale. Whilst many of us have built integrated systems before (some of which could do more within a single domain) none of us have worked to put so much from many different fields into a single system.