Competitions and Industrial Tasks as a Way to Learn Basic Concepts in Robotics

This paper presents a graduate course project based on a challenging industrial task as a way to learn basic concepts in robotics. The students had to face a simplified version of a task proposed as part of an European Competition. The general aim is to identify an object and place a manipulator in a certain target position with respect to it. Students have to use information provided by a stereo camera in order to guarantee a good pose estimation. The object is not placed in a fixed and predefined spot, but the pose can vary in a range within a maximum of 5 cm in position and 3 degrees in rotation on each direction. The learning objectives of both course and project are introduced and compared with the students' background. We discuss the solutions proposed by the students, together with the amount of time they and their instructors dedicated to solve the task. Answers to a survey have been collected and discussed in order to better evaluate the students' experience

How a Cooperative Behavior can emerge from a Robot Team

In this paper, we suggest an hybrid architecture where the deliberative part takes advantages from the reactive one and vice versa, to make a multi-robot system to exhibit some assigned cooperative task. We explain our architecture in terms of schemas and a set of firing conditions. To experiment our approach, we have realized an implementation that tries to exploit the resources of our robot team participating to Middle-size RoboCup tournaments. Each individual exhibits both reactive and deliberative behaviors which are needed to perform cooperative tasks. To this aim we have designed each robot to become aware of distinguishing configuration patterns in the environment by evaluating descriptive conditions as macroparameters. They are implemented at reactive level, whereas the deliberative level is responsible of a dynamic role assignment among teammates on the basis of the knowledge about the best behavior the team could perform. This approach was successfully tessted during the Middle-size Challenge Competition held in Padua on last RobCup2003