Phase 5 done 12 days ahead of the M4 gate, Phase 6 underway. The cinematic trailer was edited from the 20 captured clips and published to YouTube early in the week. The back half shifted to documentation and framing — making the research question explicit: coordination, not stabilization. 10 days remain to the Apr 24 deadline. No training is planned; only editing, rehearsal, and submission remain.
Milestones
- Cinematic trailer published (Apr 8). Trailer cut in DaVinci / Premiere from the 20 clips captured in Phase 5 sub-A and uploaded to YouTube with a general-audience description (drones / AI / RL).
- Phase 5 Testing Report compiled (Apr 8). Results consolidated from Phase 4 M3 gate evidence — checkpoint, metrics, obstacle / dropout / scale claims with the corrected body-radius measurement.
- README polish (Apr 8, Apr 13). Project banner
(
docs/assets/banner.jpg) added; schedule table and status badge rolled forward to Phase 6. Followed on Apr 13 by a thesis + approach rewrite and a new concepts reference explaining ML / RL / GNN for the portfolio audience. - Scope clarification (Apr 13). Added a “Coordination, Not
Stabilization” section to
docs/design/architecture.mdand a matching scope note at the top of the proposal’s executive summary. States the research question explicitly — can a learned GNN policy replace hand-designed multi-agent coordination logic — and the architectural consequence: the learned policy lives at Layer 2 and would feed a classical PID/LQR inner loop in any production deployment. Closes a recurring framing gap when explaining the project to non-RL audiences. - Phase 5 and Phase 6 docs updated to reflect Phase 5 Complete and Phase 6 in progress.
Next Steps (Week 15, Apr 15 – Apr 21)
- Presentation narration. Record voiceover against the already-cut cinematic clips — story beats: research question, GNN coordination layer, dropout / obstacle / scale results, what worked and what didn’t. Cinematic videos are already done; this week is pure narration + edit pass.
- Testing Report wrap-up. Close out
docs/project/testing_report.md— final metrics tables, figures, and the corrected body-radius obstacle claims. Written companion to the narrated video. - Portfolio + Learning Journal final pass (submission Apr 24).
- Clean-clone reproducibility check against README only.
- Final doc sweep: changelog close-out, phase doc status sync,
v1.0.0-capstonegit tag.
Challenges
- Framing, not engineering. The recurring gap when explaining the project to non-RL audiences was fixed this week by making the research question explicit in both the architecture doc and the proposal — coordination at Layer 2, not low-level stabilization.
- 10 days remain to the Apr 24 deadline — Phase 5 finishing 12 days ahead of the M4 gate leaves the runway clear for narration, rehearsal, and submission.