Alternatives for programming a low-cost UAV in robotics

The aim of this paper are to present different alternatives to program a commercially available ffying platform, and to discuss what we consider more convenient to be used by our under-graduate students in a regular robotics course to teach them basic vision based control. Due to the background of our students, we will focus more on the description of the software application interface, than on the hardware, although we will describe also both. We also will describ

Mobile prototyping platforms for remote engineering applications

This paper describes a low-cost mobile communication platform as a universal rapid-prototyping system, which is based on the Quadrocopter concept. At the Integrated Hardware and Software Systems Group at the Ilmenau University of Technology these mobile platforms are used to motivate bachelor and master students to study Computer Engineering sciences. This could be done by increasing their interest in technical issues, using this platform as integral part of a new ad-hoc lab to demonstrate different aspects in the area of Mobile Communication as well as universal rapid prototyping nodes to investigate different mechanisms for self-organized mobile communication systems within the International Graduate School on Mobile Communications. Beside the three fields of application, the paper describes the current architecture concept of the mobile prototyping platform as well as the chosen control mechanism and the assigned sensor systems to fulfill all the required tasks

RoboKing - Bringing robotics closer to pupils

In this paper, we introduce RoboKing, a national contest of mobile autonomous robots, dedicated to teams of high school students. RoboKing differs from similar contests by supporting the participating teams with a 250 Euro voucher and by not restricting the kind of materials the robots can be build with. Its task is manageable for students without previous knowledge in robotics but offers enough complexity to be challenging for advanced participants. The first RoboKing contest with 12 participating teams from different parts of Germany took place at the Hannover Messe in 2004. Because of its great success, RoboKing will be held annually. RoboKing 2005 has been extended to 20 teams of pupils and offers a new challenging task. More pictures and video files can be found under www. roboking. de