MATLAB provides too many functions #8
Description
Recent versions of MATLAB, especially with its Robotics and Computer Vision System toolboxes, provides many useful functions (premade controllers with PurePursuit, very good implementations of RANSAC for some shapes with pcfitcylinder or pcfitplane, a well-performing bag of features with bagOfFeatures). With all these functions, the project becomes rather simple --- but students are not on par: some of them can afford these toolboxes, others can't (and some others just crack MATLAB).
Thus, I think there are two problems that appeared in the recent years:
- the project becomes too simple when MATLAB takes a large part of the complexity
- students do not stand on the same ground for financial reasons
Modifying the project to avoid the parts that are already done by MATLAB would be a daunting task that would have to be performed each and every year, as new versions keep adding features.
I think it would be best to create new/more milestones that are more complex than the existing ones, and require more thinking, for which no perfect turnkey solution can be developed (with the current state of the art): for example, merging all B1 to B3 milestones as only one one milestone, adding a new one to pick objects in more complex situations (within a bag); adding moving objects in the map.
To ensure that all students have access to the same tools, we could provide more libraries than Peter Corke's RTB that implement similar functionalities as MATLAB toolboxes (an up-to-date VLFeat already brings a lot to the table for vision and machine learning, for instance). We could also add a list of pointers to those functions (as I did in http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~tcuvelier/?page=teaching.16-ir#course-1).