New ways to learn science with enjoyment: robotics as a challenge

It is well known that during their learning process youngsters prefer and enjoy exciting challenges, so that they don’t get bored in school. Many of those challenges are blossoming all around the world in an annual basis, and they stimulate students because they create new objectives, they allow creativity, discovering new and unique solutions and allow comparison of the work carried out by other teams. The robotics interest has been growing quickly and many schools are adopting this knowledge area due to its multidisciplinary, for being stimulating, for allowing students creativity, for being so practical and hands-on, and it technologically sounds good. Many challenges have being created in the last few years, both pedagogical and competitive, and requiring different levels of know-how. This paper describes the most important robotics challenges in terms of it main objectives and rules, the age target, its geographical localization, its average budget and the first steps to be taken for new teams. After reading this paper teachers will be able to decide which robotic challenge is more suitable for his team

Systematic mapping literature review of mobile robotics competitions

This paper presents a systematic mapping literature review about the mobile robotics competitions that took place over the last few decades in order to obtain an overview of the main objectives, target public, challenges, technologies used and final application area to show how these competitions have been contributing to education. In the review we found 673 papers from 5 different databases and at the end of the process, 75 papers were classified to extract all the relevant information using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method. More than 50 mobile robotics competitions were found and it was possible to analyze most of the competitions in detail in order to answer the research questions, finding the main goals, target public, challenges, technologies and application area, mainly in education.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Retrospect on Robotic Telepresence

Determination of response times of the communicating distributed processes is presented as a fundamental problem i n time - critical applications. A lot of research has been done on the analysis of communication protocols. Todays distributed real ti me systems grow more and more complex. Telecommunication has introduced RTC (real time communication) as a method of informa tion exchange with a negligible latency. A fundamental requirement of all real time systems is that all the tasks should have a deadline to estimate their worst execution times (WET) reliably. Real time communications may include telephony, amateur radio, instant messaging (IM), voice over internet protocol (VoIP), live video conference communications, live teleconference communications and robotic telepresence. In this paper, we are going to discuss the applications of robotic telepresence whereby an agent acts as a surrogate for a remote user

Diseño e implementación del hardware de control de un microrobot (EUROBOT 2009)

El objetivo de este proyecto era el diseño y puesta en marcha de un microrobot para su participación en la competición Eurobot 2009 (Templos de Atlantis). Se trataba de construir un sistema totalmente autónomo, capaz de moverse por el campo de juego, encontrar las piezas en él distribuidas y recogerlas y manipularlas para realizar construcciones (templos de Atlantis) con el objeto de conseguir la mejor puntuación. En cuanto a la estrategia de acciones en el campo, posiblemente, se optó por la mejor de ellas. Tras el análisis de las escogidas por el resto de equipos se comprobó que la adecuada realización de la que se había seleccionado era la que más puntos otorgaba en el menor tiempo y con mejores dificultades. No sin motivo, esta estrategia, o variantes de ella, era la utilizada por la mayoría de equipos. En cuanto al sistema locomotriz, se consiguió un desplazamiento rápido y con gran capacidad de giro y un buen agarre al terreno. Aunque, debido al continuo funcionamiento y las constantes vibraciones, con el transcurso de las pruebas se aflojaban de su eje, lo que provocaba una desviación considerable de la trayectoria. La solución adoptada para este problema era sencilla, controlar la tortillería y revisar las uniones de forma periódica. El sistema de manipulación de piezas es, sin duda, la parte más problemática, al no ser especialmente rápido y las dificultades de ajuste de sus componentes. En especial, para el ajuste de los ejes de la cinta transportadora se necesitó demasiado tiempo para los resultados obtenidos. Además, al no disponer de los medios necesarios para realizar correctamente esta calibración, se han dispuesto pequeños correctores a modo de guía para salvar la pequeña desviación que sufría inicialmente la cinta. El sistema sensorial ha dado unos buenos resultados. Aunque, con un mayor presupuesto, se podrían utilizar sensores de mayor precisión, mejorando los resultados. En cuanto al sistema electrónico, en general, se han cumplido las expectativas, pero han surgido algunos problemas que podrían mejorarse, derivados del consumo de potencia por la utilización de una placa base industrial. Aunque compensa con creces su uso, por la rapidez y eficacia en el manejo de los datos. Finalmente se ha construido un robot completamente autónomo el cual ha superado la prueba nacional quedando en segundo lugar tras realizar una clasificación final muy ajustada.Ingeniería Técnica en Electrónic

#MDXPD Product Design 2017

A review of Middlesex Product Design and Design Engineering staff, student and professional collaborator publications, research, awards and project work for 2017

Affordance-based task communication methods for astronaut-robot cooperation

The problem with current human-robot task communication is that robots cannot understand complex human speech utterances, while humans cannot efficiently use the fixed task request utterances required by robots. Nonetheless, future planetary exploration missions are expected to require astronauts on extra-vehicular activities to communicate task requests to robot assistants with speech- and gesture-type user interfaces that can be easily embedded in their space suits. The solution proposed in this thesis is indirect task communication based on the human-like ability to utilise object-action relationships in task communication. Conventional task communication methods, in which all task parameters need to be communicated explicitly, are evaluated against task communication methods where affordances, i.e. action possibilities, are used to complete task communication. These so-called affordance-based task communication methods are evaluated by means of four user experiments: two performed with a fully autonomous centauroid robot in a planetary exploration work context and two with a simulated robot in a lander assembly work context. The first two experiments are performed in unambiguous work environments, where each object is associated with only one action and vice versa, while the last two experiments are performed in ambiguous work environments, where each object and action is normally associated with several actions and objects, respectively. The user experiments show that affordance-based task communication methods can be used to decrease both the human workload and task communication times in a planetary exploration work context. Furthermore, affordance-based task communication methods are found to be preferred over conventional task communication methods. The affordance-based task communication methods derived can be applied to facilitate any human-robot task communication that includes a priori known or recurring task sequences. In this thesis, the feasibility of the approach was demonstrated for frame-based dialogue managers, which are widely used in robotics

Marshall Space Flight Center Research and Technology Report 2015

The investments in technology development we made in 2015 not only support the Agency's current missions, but they will also enable new missions. Some of these projects will allow us to develop an in-space architecture for human space exploration; Marshall employees are developing and testing cutting-edge propulsion solutions that will propel humans in-space and land them on Mars. Others are working on technologies that could support a deep space habitat, which will be critical to enable humans to live and work in deep space and on other worlds. Still others are maturing technologies that will help new scientific instruments study the outer edge of the universe-instruments that will provide valuable information as we seek to explore the outer planets and search for life

Airborne chemical sensing with mobile robots

Airborne chemical sensing with mobile robots has been an active research areasince the beginning of the 1990s. This article presents a review of research work in this field,including gas distribution mapping, trail guidance, and the different subtasks of gas sourcelocalisation. Due to the difficulty of modelling gas distribution in a real world environmentwith currently available simulation techniques, we focus largely on experimental work and donot consider publications that are purely based on simulations