21,543 research outputs found
Al-Robotics team: A cooperative multi-unmanned aerial vehicle approach for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge
The Al-Robotics team was selected as one of the 25 finalist teams out of 143 applications received to participate in the first edition of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge (MBZIRC), held in 2017. In particular, one of the competition Challenges offered us the opportunity to develop a cooperative approach with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) searching, picking up, and dropping static and moving objects. This paper presents the approach that our team Al-Robotics followed to address that Challenge 3 of the MBZIRC. First, we overview the overall architecture of the system, with the different modules involved. Second, we describe the procedure that we followed to design the aerial platforms, as well as all their onboard components. Then, we explain the techniques that we used to develop the software functionalities of the system. Finally, we discuss our experimental results and the lessons that we learned before and during the competition. The cooperative approach was validated with fully autonomous missions in experiments previous to the actual competition. We also analyze the results that we obtained during the competition trials.Unión Europea H2020 73166
9 steps to scale climate-smart agriculture: Lessons and experiences from the climate-smart villages in My Loi, Vietnam and Guinayangan, Philippines
The Climate-Smart Village approach is a CCAFS agricultural research for development (AR4D) strategy for stimulating the scaling of climate-smart agriculture. CSVs are established in Southeast Asia through the CCAFS program to serve as sites for “testing, through participatory methods, technological and institutional options for generating evidence of CSA effectiveness as well as drawing out scaling lessons for policy makers from local to global levels (CCAFS, 2016). The CSVs in My Loi in Vietnam and Guinayangan in the Philippines were established following this strategy starting 2014 by the World Agroforestry (ICRAF) Vietnam and the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction, respectively. This guidebook showcases the common experiences of the IIRR and ICRAF in the Philippine and Vietnam CSVs, which are outlined in 5 major stages and broken into 9 steps
Feedback for future learning: delivering enhancements and evidencing impacts on the student learning experience
Enhancing the student learning experience through the provision of improved student feedback is both challenging and complex. ‘Feedback for Future Learning’ was a Glasgow Caledonian University(GCU)-wide project intended to enhance feedback practices from both the student and staff perspectives; to ensure greater awareness of, and reflection upon, feedback by students; and to encourage greater use of feedback to inform future student learning. The design, implementation and evaluation of approaches to ‘Feedback for Future Learning’ are described with an emphasis on STEM disciplines. The conceptualisation, design and implementation of a range of student feedback tools and approaches aimed to develop understanding of learning processes, reinforce learning and improve performance. This was achieved through collaboration with the GCU Students’ Association and the establishment of the University Feedback Enhancement Group. A series of generic and bespoke seminars, workshops, individual programme interventions and competitions were used to enhance comprehension of the perception, experience and use of formative and summative assessment feedback by students. Providing opportunities for reflection and evaluation together with qualitative and quantitative metrics have demonstrated 93% satisfaction with student feedback enhancement workshops, a trebling of engagement with memorable feedback survey initiatives and a 9% increase in National Student Survey assessment and feedback satisfaction. A 16% rise in student satisfaction with the promptness of feedback, a 14% improvement in satisfaction with the detailed comments received and an 8% increase in satisfaction with the helpfulness of comments received were achieved. The lessons learned inform the continuing and sustainable enhancement of the student learning experience for STEM students and the wider University community. Keywords: Feedback, future learning, dialogue, engagement, reflection, enhancemen
Open-Source Drone Programming Course for Distance Engineering Education.
This article presents a full course for autonomous aerial robotics inside the RoboticsAcademy framework. This “drone programming” course is open-access and ready-to-use for any teacher/student to teach/learn drone programming with it for free. The students may program diverse drones on their computers without a physical presence in this course. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) applications are essentially practical, as their intelligence resides in the software part. Therefore, the proposed course emphasizes drone programming through practical learning. It comprises a collection of exercises resembling drone applications in real life, such as following a road, visual landing, and people search and rescue, including their corresponding background theory. The course has been successfully taught for five years to students from several university engineering degrees. Some exercises from the course have also been validated in three aerial robotics competitions, including an international one. RoboticsAcademy is also briefly presented in the paper. It is an open framework for distance robotics learning in engineering degrees. It has been designed as a practical complement to the typical online videos of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Its educational contents are built upon robot operating system (ROS) middleware (de facto standard in robot programming), the powerful 3D Gazebo simulator, and the widely used Python programming language. Additionally, RoboticsAcademy is a suitable tool for gamified learning and online robotics competitions, as it includes several competitive exercises and automatic assessment toolspost-print5214 K
RAFCON: a Graphical Tool for Task Programming and Mission Control
There are many application fields for robotic systems including service
robotics, search and rescue missions, industry and space robotics. As the
scenarios in these areas grow more and more complex, there is a high demand for
powerful tools to efficiently program heterogeneous robotic systems. Therefore,
we created RAFCON, a graphical tool to develop robotic tasks and to be used for
mission control by remotely monitoring the execution of the tasks. To define
the tasks, we use state machines which support hierarchies and concurrency.
Together with a library concept, even complex scenarios can be handled
gracefully. RAFCON supports sophisticated debugging functionality and tightly
integrates error handling and recovery mechanisms. A GUI with a powerful state
machine editor makes intuitive, visual programming and fast prototyping
possible. We demonstrated the capabilities of our tool in the SpaceBotCamp
national robotic competition, in which our mobile robot solved all exploration
and assembly challenges fully autonomously. It is therefore also a promising
tool for various RoboCup leagues.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
JUGE: An Infrastructure for Benchmarking Java Unit Test Generators
Researchers and practitioners have designed and implemented various automated
test case generators to support effective software testing. Such generators
exist for various languages (e.g., Java, C#, or Python) and for various
platforms (e.g., desktop, web, or mobile applications). Such generators exhibit
varying effectiveness and efficiency, depending on the testing goals they aim
to satisfy (e.g., unit-testing of libraries vs. system-testing of entire
applications) and the underlying techniques they implement. In this context,
practitioners need to be able to compare different generators to identify the
most suited one for their requirements, while researchers seek to identify
future research directions. This can be achieved through the systematic
execution of large-scale evaluations of different generators. However, the
execution of such empirical evaluations is not trivial and requires a
substantial effort to collect benchmarks, setup the evaluation infrastructure,
and collect and analyse the results. In this paper, we present our JUnit
Generation benchmarking infrastructure (JUGE) supporting generators (e.g.,
search-based, random-based, symbolic execution, etc.) seeking to automate the
production of unit tests for various purposes (e.g., validation, regression
testing, fault localization, etc.). The primary goal is to reduce the overall
effort, ease the comparison of several generators, and enhance the knowledge
transfer between academia and industry by standardizing the evaluation and
comparison process. Since 2013, eight editions of a unit testing tool
competition, co-located with the Search-Based Software Testing Workshop, have
taken place and used and updated JUGE. As a result, an increasing amount of
tools (over ten) from both academia and industry have been evaluated on JUGE,
matured over the years, and allowed the identification of future research
directions
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Using the Internet of Things to Teach Good Software Engineering Practice to High School Students
This paper describes a course to introduce high school students
to software engineering in practice using the Internet Of
Things (IoT). IoT devices allow students to get quick, visible
results without watering down technical aspects of
programming and networking. The course has three broad
goals: (1) to make software engineering fun and applicable,
with the aim of recruiting traditionally underrepresented
groups into computing; (2) to make young students begin to
approach problems with a design mindset; and (3) to show
students that computer science, generally, and software
engineering, specifically, is about much more than
programming. The course unfolds in three segments. The first
is a whirlwind introduction to a subset of IoT technologies.
Students complete a specific task (or set of tasks) using each
technology. This segment culminates in a “do-it-yourself”
project, in which the students implement a simple IoT
application using their basic knowledge of the technologies.
The course’s second segment introduces software engineering
practices, again primarily via hands-on practical tutorials. In
the third segment of the course, the students conceive of,
design, and implement a project that uses the technologies
introduced in the first segment, all while being attentive to the
good software engineering practices acquired in the second
segment. In addition to presenting the course curriculum, the
paper also discusses a first offering of the course in a threeweek
summer intensive program in 2017, including
assessments done to evaluate the curriculum.Cockrell School of Engineerin
The Power of Primary Schools to Change and Sustain Handwashing with Soap among Children: The Cases of Vietnam and Peru
World Bank Water and Sanitation Program's Global Scaling up Handwashing Project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is an effort to expand handwashing among women and children by using innovative promotional approaches. This working paper provides case studies of the project in Vietnam and Peru. Both used entertainment education and teacher capacity building, but as a result of differences in government and education contexts, as well as child-focused research that revealed important cultural differences, programs varied substantially among the two locations. In both cases, the primary school setting was found to be an effective site for improving handwashing
SAT Competition 2020
The SAT Competitions constitute a well-established series of yearly open international algorithm implementation competitions, focusing on the Boolean satisfiability (or propositional satisfiability, SAT) problem. In this article, we provide a detailed account on the 2020 instantiation of the SAT Competition, including the new competition tracks and benchmark selection procedures, overview of solving strategies implemented in top-performing solvers, and a detailed analysis of the empirical data obtained from running the competition
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