Assignment #3: Lab Report Analysis 

Syed Ali  

City College of New York  

 

 

Lab reports are an essential component of technical writing. They are a means by which scientists share the data of their experiments and send newfound knowledge into the thinking space. Since their beginning, technological sciences have flourished with knowledge as a result of lab reports written by scientists within the field. An understanding of what goes into these pieces of writing, as well as reasons scientists gravitate towards certain formats is pivotal for one to be successful in any technical field. Three similar reports within this field that follow the correspondence for lab reports are “Bio-insect and Artificial Robot Interaction: Learning Mechanism and Experiment,” by Jiwan Son and Hyo-sun Ahn, “Control of a Robot Dancer for Enhancing Haptic Human-Robot Interaction in Waltz,” by Hongbo Wang and Kazuhiro Kosuge, and “Multimodal Feedback for Active Robot-Object Interaction,” by Luis Contreras. Although each report discusses different processes, all three are fundamentally very similar as they all share a common goal of enhancing certain technologies through preferred methods. They are also alike in that they all follow a predetermined format that is common among scientists across the world. Being the thing that first catches your attention 

When examining each of these reports, the first thing that meets the eye is the title. The title must be detailed enough to provide the reader with enough context before reading the text. The three lab reports previously mentioned differ in their degree of specificity and detail. For starters “Bio-insect and Artificial Robot Interaction: Learning Mechanism and Experiment,” doesn’t fully explain the purpose of the experiment. However, after reading the entire lab report, it can be concluded that the experiment was designed to prove the use of fuzzy logic in complex environments more than anything. Scientists weren’t trying to find a new learning mechanism; they were trying to further prove a previously acclaimed one. Likewise, in “Multimodal Feedback for Robot-Object Interaction,” the experiment was more centered around the use of both visual and mechanical components to get the most accurate results while reducing computation time. The title for both experiments didn’t accurately reflect the entire purpose of the experiment. As far as “Control of a Robot Dancer for Enhancing Haptic Human-Robot Interaction in Waltz,” the title did state the purpose of the experiment concisely and effectively as what was stated in the title was tested as haptics were used to improve motor capabilities and dynamics of robots. The title reflected exactly what was discussed in the report. 

When considering the abstracts of each report, it can be concluded that they fulfilled their purpose as they summarized every aspects of the lab report including the procedure, results and conclusions in a concise, but detailed fashion. Generally, abstracts are hard to interpret unless you are part of the intended audience of the authors. As far for these three lab reports, it was particularly difficult to understand the lab report without prior knowledge on the subject matter as they included technical language such as, “inverse pendulum model” and “virtual force controller” (Wang, Kosuge, 2012). This is mainly because each section of the lab report has its own individual purpose and having prior knowledge can aid in the understanding of the abstract. Aside from the content of the experiments, there were very few differences in the abstracts between the reports as they were all brief reiterations of what happened throughout the experiment relative to the intended purpose.  

Of all the components included in each of these lab reports, the introductions have the most differences in terms of conventions and format. “Bio-insect and Artificial Robot Interactions: Learning Mechanism and Experiment,” and “Control of a Robot for Haptic Human-Robot Interaction in Waltz,” both have multiple sections for introducing several concepts and components of the experiment. Because computer engineering and machine learning are such vast and abstract fields, it is important to give a detailed, but concise, explanation of each of the processes. In “Bio-insect and Artificial Robot Interactions: Learning Mechanism and Experiment” the introduction is broken into two components: the formal introduction and the explanation of the fuzzy logic learning mechanism. The formal introduction was in a more conventional fashion, providing the hypothesis and the purpose of the experiment while also comparing the concepts used throughout the experiment to previous research done by other scientists. The first component of the introduction provided in depth information regarding the functionality of an abstract logic system known as fuzzy logic. In this case a separate section was essential because, the ability of the fuzzy logic to provide reward values despite the complexity of the environment was crucial to the experiment; it tied directly to the purpose which was to prove fuzzy logic would be more effective in performing the intended tasks (Sohn, Ahn, 2013). Likewise, in “Control of a Robot for Haptic Human-Robot Interaction in Waltz,” the authors included multiple sections for the introduction. In this case, both sections were included to explain how the robot would detect human position in the sagittal plane and how the robot made estimations which were also very essential to the understanding of the experiment (Wang, Kosuge, 2012). Although this idea of ‘sections’ deviates from the conventional format of writing lab reports, in certain cases where there are complexities with the experiment it is important to provide as much information as possible. In the case of “Multimodal Feedback for Active Robot-Object Interaction,”, a more conventional introduction process was followed as there was only one introduction that was able to comprehensively explain all aspects of the experiment and provide background. In this case, it is more appropriate to stick to the conventional “template” for writing an introduction as there are less factors at play within the experiment.  

For all three reports, the introductions blended into the procedure. Every introduction included components of the procedure. None of the experiments had a formal section for the procedure section. They all had sections discussing certain functions of the experiment while briefly describing everything done in each experiment. The most unorthodox approach was in “Bio-Insect and Artificial Robot Interactions: Learning Mechanism and Experiment,” because it included three procedures for three separate experiments. The first was the procedure for a minor experiment to decide on the actuation method for getting a reaction form the stag beetle. The second was a procedure that confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed learning mechanism. Finally, the third procedure described the actual experiment. Three reports were necessary in this lab report mainly because of the complexity of the concepts being discussed. On the other hand, “Control of a Robot Dancer for Enhancing Haptic Human-Robot Interaction in Waltz,” included only one procedure. The components within were not nearly as complex as the previously discussed lab experiment. As a result, the procedure section maintained a degree of simplicity. The same can be seen in “Multimodal Feedback for Active Robot-Object Interaction,” as the procedure was somehow fit right before the results.  

Between the three lab reports, the most conventional component is the results section as all three reports had some medium of data illustration with an explanation. The consistency of format between the three was expected going into each report as regardless of the complexity of the work, the results section is numbers and their meanings, and the discussion section is a thorough explanation of the numbers in the context of the experiment and the knowledge space. One thing that was interesting about the way data was presented in “Bio-Insect and Artificial Robot Interactions: Learning Mechanism and Experiment,” was that there was a summary section, that summed up the findings between both mechanisms. This was appropriate because two vast data sets were provided by the mechanisms and the summary provided a conclusion about the data at a first glance.  

Another interesting fact regarding the data, is the way in which it is presented in “Control of a Robot Dancer for Enhancing Haptic Human-Robot Interaction in Waltz,”. Because the robot’s movements and compliance with the human couldn’t be measured by integer values, it had to be measured by angles and graph trajectory. The way the data was presented is a lot more difficult to interpret and requires more background reading and understanding to grasp. The results in “Multimodal Feedback for Active Robot-Object Interaction,” included the most minimal means of displaying the results as it only included one table.  

The discussion and conclusion sections were also very similar across all three reports. They were very brief relative to the rest of the experiment and only included required information. In terms of the discussion component all three reports summed up their results and gave and provided an answer to whether the hypothesis and purpose was fulfilled. For example, in “Bio-Insect and Artificial Robot Interactions: Learning Mechanism and Experiment,” it is stated that the fuzzy logic mechanism worked as good as can be expected, meaning that the hypothesis was fulfilled as the scientists were able to obtain desirable results (Sohn, Ahn, 2013). In addition, the results were compared to the previous smaller experiments conducted within the overall experiment. Similarly, the other two experiments discussed trends and defined the data in terms of whether the data supported the original purpose and discussed the error of the experiments. The conclusion sections across all three experiments are brief and summarized the experiments while reiterating the purpose. The conclusion serves as a more concise version of the abstract in each of these lab reports.  

Throughout the lab reports there are several instances where the scientists deviate from the lab report format to serve the purpose of their experiment and the different levels of sophistication in their components. Essentially, every report served the same purpose and carried out similar functions, just changed to better convey the data of each specific experiment.  

Bibliography 

Son, JH. & Ahn, HS. Soft Comput (2014) 18: 1127. https://doi-org.ccny- proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.1007/s00500-013-1133-4 

 

Wang, H. (2012). Control of a Robot Dancer for Enhancing Haptic Human-Robot Interaction in Waltz. IEEE Transactions on Haptics. doi: 0.1109/TOH.2012.36 

Contreras, L., Yokiyama, H., & Okada, H. (2018). Multimodal feedback for active robot-object interaction. DBLP. doi: 10.0000/0000