Mobile robot based electrostatic spray system for controlling pests on cotton plants in Iraq

A mobile robot based electrostatic spray system was developed to combat pest infestation on cotton plants in Iraq. The system consists of a charged spray nozzle, a CCD camera, a mobile robot (vehicle and arm) and Arduino microcontroller. Arduino microcontroller is used to control the spray nozzle and the robot. Matlab is used to process the image from the CCD camera and to generate the appropriate control signals to the robot and the spray nozzle. COMSOL multi-physics FEM software was used to design the induction electrodes to achieve maximum charge transfer onto the fan spray liquid film resulting in achieving the desired charge/mass ratio of the spray. The charged spray nozzle was operated on short duration pulsed spray mode. Image analysis was employed to investigate the spray deposition on improvised insect targets on an artificial plant.The ministry of higher education and scientific research of Iraqi governmen

Design and Fabrication of Autonomous Entertainment Mobile Robot

Mobile robots are already widely used for surveillance, inspection and transportation tasks. An emerging technology with enormous potential is the entertainment mobile robot. Sony Corporation has developed a Sony dog known as Sony's Aibo that cannot speak but can chase a ball, lie down, sit and wag its tail. The robot must operate in a safe and friendly manner, avoiding obstacles and posing no risk to human in its vicinity. The scenario in Malaysia is that not many entertainment mobile robot has been developed because generally, Malaysians are content with their role as a user rather than a developer . In order to achieve the objectives of the "Vision 2020", Malaysia should produce more scientists and developers in various areas. The best and most effective way of learning and stimulating interest in entertainment robot is through contests. Therefore, Sirim Berhad and the Ministry of Education have organized the Robot Games Festival or Robofest 2002 to encourage researchers, lecturers and students to design and develop robotic systems. The main objective of this project is to design and develop an entertainment mobile robot that can place as many beach balls as possible into the cylinder tubes within 3 minutes

Development of a miniature robot for swarm robotic application

Biological swarm is a fascinating behavior of nature that has been successfully applied to solve human problem especially for robotics application. The high economical cost and large area required to execute swarm robotics scenarios does not permit experimentation with real robot. Model and simulation of the mass number of these robots are extremely complex and often inaccurate. This paper describes the design decision and presents the development of an autonomous miniature mobile-robot (AMiR) for swarm robotics research and education. The large number of robot in these systems allows designing an individual AMiR unit with simple perception and mobile abilities. Hence a large number of robots can be easily and economically feasible to be replicated. AMiR has been designed as a complete platform with supporting software development tools for robotics education and researches in the Department of Computer and Communication Systems Engineering, UPM. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using this robot to implement swarm robotic applications

Digital Systems Teaching and Research (DSTR) Robot: A Flexible Platform for Education and Applied Research

The DSTR (pronounced “Disaster”) robot has a strong history of being adaptable to different user’s needs, and there are many opportunities ahead that indicate that the sky, quite literally, is not the limit for this robust platform. This paper provides a historical perspective on the development of the DSTR robot as a collaborative design developed by the Mobile Integrated Solutions Laboratory (MISL) at Texas A&M University and ASEP 4X4 Inc. Texas Instruments has been a major partner in the integration of the control electronics, and Texas Space Technology Applications and Research (T STAR) LLC has played a significant role in the propagation of the DSTR robot as an adaptable applied research/education/STEM outreach platform. The paper will present examples of the strong industry-academic relationships that allow the DSTR robot to be utilized in a multitude of experiential learning environments. In addition to a number of STEM outreach activities, the DSTR robots are being used in the Introduction to Engineering course at Blinn College and in the Freshman Engineering curriculum at Texas A&M University. DSTRs have also been selected by NASA scientists as a low-cost lunar sample collector. The paper will also discuss the newly developed DSTR-E (DSTR Engineering) unit which requires students to perform several engineering tasks during the build process. The paper will also include the lessons learned from initial design through its transfer to the private sector for commercialization and future plans.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Designing and implementation of robot mapping algorithm for mobile robot

.A mobile robot is an automatic machine that is capable of movement in any given environment [1]. The Capabilities of Mobile Robot(s) are: Moving around based on the user’s input, Avoiding obstacle in front of it and Calculating the path. The Criteria of Mobile Robot: Desktop size. A robot that can evolve on the desk near the computer improves drastically the student efficiency during experimentation. Wide range of possibilities from an engineering and educational point of view. To exploit this tool in various fields of education such as signal processing, automatic control, embedded programming, or distributed intelligent systems design, the robot should provide a wide set of functionalities in its basic version. User friendly. The user interface has to be simple, efficient, and intuitive. This is an important point for the acceptance of the system by the students. The broad introduction in engineering classes requires a large number of robots. Knowing that the budget of many schools is constant or decreasing, this is only feasible by reducing the cost of an individual robot. Open information. This robot has to be shared among professors, laboratories, schools and universities. An open source hardware/software development model is an effective way to achieve this goal

Motion planning of a climbing parallel robot

This paper proposes a novel application of the Stewart–Gough parallel platform as a climbing robot and its kinematics control to climb through long structures describing unknown spatial trajectories, such as palm trunks, tubes, etc. First, the description and design of the climbing parallel robot is presented. Second, the inverse and forward kinematics analysis of a mobile six-degrees-of-freedom parallel robot is described, based on spatial constraint formulation. Finally, the gait pattern and the climbing strategy of the parallel robot is described. The information from this research is being used in an actual climbing parallel robot design at Miguel Hernández University of Elche (Alicante), Spain.This paper was recommended for publication by Associate Editor M. Shoham and Editor I. Walker upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture under Project 1FD1997-1338

The operation of autonomous mobile robot assistants in the environment of care facilities adopting a user-centered development design

The participation of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA (Stuttgart, Germany) and the companies User Interface Design GmbH (Ludwigsburg, Germany) plus MLR System GmbH (Ludwigsburg, Germany) enabled the research and findings presented in this paper; we would like to namely mention Birgit Graf and Theo Jacobs (Fraunhofer IPA) furthermore Peter Klein and Christiane Hartmann (User Interface Design GmbH).The successful development of autonomous mobile robot assistants depends significantly on the well-balanced reconcilements of the technically possible and the socially desirable. Based on empirical research substantiated conclusions can be established for the suitability of "scenario-based design" (Rosson/Carroll 2003) for the successful development of mobile robot assistants and automated guided vehicles to be applied for service functions in stationary care facilities for seniors.supported by the WiMi-Care project [http://www.wimi-care.de] funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (FKZ: 01FC08024-27)

An Omnidirectional Platform for Education and Research in Cooperative Robotics

In this paper we present a new, affordable, omnidirectional robot platform which is suitable for research and education in cooperative robotics. We design and implement the platform for the purpose of multi-agent object manipulation and transportation. The design consists of three omnidirectional wheels with two additional traction wheels, making multirobot object manipulation possible. It is validated by performing simple experiments using a setup with one robot and one target object. The execution flow of a simple task (Approach–Press–Lift–Hold–Set) is studied. In addition, we experiment to find the limits of the applied pressure and object orientation under certain conditions. The experiments demonstrate the significance of our inexpensive platform for research and education by proving its feasibility of use in topics such as collaborative robotics, physical interaction, and mobile manipulation

Mobile Robot Lab Project to Introduce Engineering Students to Fault Diagnosis in Mechatronic Systems

This document is a self-archiving copy of the accepted version of the paper. Please find the final published version in IEEEXplore: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TE.2014.2358551This paper proposes lab work for learning fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) in mechatronic systems. These skills are important for engineering education because FDD is a key capability of competitive processes and products. The intended outcome of the lab work is that students become aware of the importance of faulty conditions and learn to design FDD strategies for a real system. To this end, the paper proposes a lab project where students are requested to develop a discrete event dynamic system (DEDS) diagnosis to cope with two faulty conditions in an autonomous mobile robot task. A sample solution is discussed for LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots with LabVIEW. This innovative practice is relevant to higher education engineering courses related to mechatronics, robotics, or DEDS. Results are also given of the application of this strategy as part of a postgraduate course on fault-tolerant mechatronic systems.This work was supported in part by the Spanish CICYT under Project DPI2011-22443