06-15-2010 SWOSU Receives Grant to Help with Upcoming Robotics Competition

Southwestern Oklahoma State University has received an $18,500 grant for student fellowships and supplies and support for future regional robotics competitions

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

Development of a tabletop guidance system for educational robots

The guidance of a vehicle in an outdoor setting is typically implemented using a Real Time Kinematic Global Positioning System (RTK-GPS) potentially enhanced by auxiliary sensors such as electronic compasses, rotation encoders, gyroscopes, and vision systems. Since GPS does not function in an indoor setting where educational competitions are often held, an alternative guidance system was developed. This article describes a guidance method that contains a laser-based localization system, which uses a robot-borne single laser transmitter spinning in a horizontal plane at an angular velocity up to 81 radians per second. Sensor arrays positioned in the corners of a flat rectangular table with dimensions of 1.22 m × 1.83 m detected the laser beam passages. The relative time differences among the detections of the laser passages gave an indication of the angles of the sensors with respect to the laser beam transmitter on the robot. These angles were translated into Cartesian coordinates. The guidance of the robot was implemented using a uni-directional wireless serial connection and position feedback from the localization system. Three experiments were conducted to test the system: 1) the accuracy of the static localization system was determined while the robot stood still. In this test the average error among valid measurements was smaller than 0.3 %. However, a maximum of 3.7 % of the measurements were invalid due to several causes. 2) The accuracy of the guidance system was assessed while the robot followed a straight line. The average deviation from this straight line was 3.6 mm while the robot followed a path with a length of approximately 0.9 m. 3) The overall performance of the guidance system was studied while the robot followed a complex path consisting of 33 sub-paths. The conclusion was that the system worked reasonably accurate, unless the robot came in close proximity

Team Contributions to the Alliance in FIRST Robotics Competitions

FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an international high school robotics competition. At each competition event, there is a qualification round, followed by a playoff round. During the qualification round, each team is scored and ranked. Top seeded teams then pick two other teams to organize into alliances to compete in the playoff round. The contributions of the alliance captain, the 1st pick, and the 2nd pick to the alliance’s probability of winning in the playoff round are evaluated using the data from eight competition events that Team 341, Miss Daisy attended during 2022 and 2023 seasons. Insights from this data exploration may help inform team’s alliance selection strategy for future competitions

Attitudinal Differences towards Robotics Competitions of Male and Female Students Participating in a Southeastern State Robotics Competition

Some of the most dynamic and demanding careers are in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). However, when analyzing gender, there are great disparities among gender in STEM. Statistics indicate females are vastly underrepresented and males are employed double the rate of females. Leading STEM companies are creatively trying to attract future STEM laborers by means of science and engineering competitions. The purpose of this quantitative causal comparative study was to investigate if there are differences in attitudes between male and female students participating in a robotics competition. A convenience sample of public school students (N = 194) from grades 7-12 that participated in a southeastern state robotics competition were used in this study. The sample consisted of 69 females and 125 males. The researcher administered a modified version of the Student’s Attitude toward Science Fairs Survey customized for use at a robotics competition. The instrument measured students’ overall attitudes toward science and engineering competitions and further explored two constructs: usefulness (utility value) and enjoyment (intrinsic value) of the competition. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to determine if differences existed between male and female students’ attitudes towards science and engineering competitions and results were disclosed. The MANOVA results determined that there are no significant differences found among male and female students and their enjoyment, value (usefulness), and total (overall attitude) values towards a robotics competition, Wilks’s Λ = 1.00, F(2, 191) = 0.10, p \u3e .05, partial η2 = 0.001. Thus, the researcher failed to reject the null hypothesis. Implications of this investigation and future recommendations for future studies were discussed

Programming Engagement in a Smart City Robot Competition. How incumbency shapes public engagement

In the last two decades, robotics competitions have become one of the most iconic events of interaction between robots, students, specialists, lay audiences, and the physical environment. Robotics competitions aim to facilitate open innovation, to put the skills of the programmers and the reliability of robotic platforms to test, and to foster education, team development, and public engagement. However, competitions are not neutral events but are rather co-produced together with the values and visions, practices, assumptions, and interests of their organizers. In this paper, we examine a number of robot competitions supported by the European Commission that we attended during 2018 and 2019. Two of these competitions took place in the intimate settings of robotics laboratories in Bristol, UK, and Oldenburg, Germany. The third competition, by contrast, took place in a shopping mall in Milton Keynes, UK, and hosted a larger and more diverse audience. We pay particular attention to the physical and semiotic infrastructures -- settings, devices, scenarios, narratives -- that gave shape to these competitions and analyze how these framed, enabled and restricted the ways in which robots interacted with their programmers and with diverse -- engaged and disengaged -- publics. We analyse our observations by drawing on the concepts of care and control, and develop the notions of “bypassing” and “embracing” engagement