Week 2: First Client Meeting

by Oliver

Facilitator Meeting

After Rhys took on the role of Communications Lead, he quickly got in contact with John McNamara in order to organise our first client meeting. In this meeting we would need to elicit the key requirements of the project and ensure we have a good enough understanding of the project to be able to generate a detailed requirements document. We came up with some key questions to ask John in this meeting:

• How Generaliseable should the solution be? (Multi-track / Single-Track)
• Will the race be alone or against other cars? (Concerning collision avoidance)
• Are we restricted to certain racing techniques?

The meeting took place on Friday afternoon. We met with John for the first time, and asked all of our questions. He spoke to us about the project, and about the tools and training IBM would provide us with for development during this project. He encouraged us to use their IBM Granite LLM to develop our model.

TORCS & The Start of Development…

John also provided us with a version of TORCS which we then all installed, and got a rough feel for the software. We looked at the Corkscrew circuit we would be racing on, and the F1 car we would be using. Kerem and Jimi, our lead developers, began brainstorming early implementations of a model, using IBM Granite, and changing parameters to see how the car behaves in reaction.

IBM Granite & SkillsBuild

To improve our use of IBM Granite, and the training resources given to us, the entire team completed a selection of IBM SkillsBuild activities. These included:

• IBM Granite Models for Software Development
• Introduction to Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Prompt Engineering: Shaping Better AI Responses
• Build Your First Chatbot
• The Rise of Multiagent Systems
• Classifying Data Using IBM Granite