Design and Implementation of a Demonstrative Palletizer Robot with Navigation for Educational Purposes

Nowadays, many kinds of robots are used in industries to help in manufacturing or placing objects. However, teaching young people and children about robot design and work can be difficult, turning this into a complicated area for them. This chapter provides a detailed description of the design and implementation of a robotic arm mounted on a mobile robot using the LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit® and the starter kit DaNI 2.0, designed by National Instruments®. The mobile palletizer robot takes a box from place A and navigates in the indoor environment until it reaches a predefined place B. The characterization of the robotic arm is based on a parallel structure considering that the end-effector has only two points to hold the object; the gripper is also built using LEGO®. The robot performs the path computed using an A-star algorithm; moreover, actions like moving up and down, opening and closing the gripper and picking up the box and putting it down are executed by the robotic arm using the central unit of the NXT kit. Each stage of the robot design and implementation is explained in detail using diagrams and 3D graphical views with the aim of illustrating the implementation step by step for educational purposes (mainly for young people or children)

RoboCup@Home: Analysis and results of evolving competitions for domestic and service robots

Scientific competitions are becoming more common in many research areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, since they provide a shared testbed for comparing different solutions and enable the exchange of research results. Moreover, they are interesting for general audiences and industries. Currently, many major research areas in artificial intelligence and robotics are organizing multiple-year competitions that are typically associated with scientific conferences. One important aspect of such competitions is that they are organized for many years. This introduces a temporal evolution that is interesting to analyze. However, the problem of evaluating a competition over many years remains unaddressed. We believe that this issue is critical to properly fuel changes over the years and measure the results of these decisions. Therefore, this article focuses on the analysis and the results of evolving competitions. In this article, we present the RoboCup@Home competition, which is the largest worldwide competition for domestic service robots, and evaluate its progress over the past seven years. We show how the definition of a proper scoring system allows for desired functionalities to be related to tasks and how the resulting analysis fuels subsequent changes to achieve general and robust solutions implemented by the teams. Our results show not only the steadily increasing complexity of the tasks that RoboCup@Home robots can solve but also the increased performance for all of the functionalities addressed in the competition. We believe that the methodology used in RoboCup@Home for evaluating competition advances and for stimulating changes can be applied and extended to other robotic competitions as well as to multi-year research projects involving Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Advances in Domestic Service Robots in the Real World

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