Practical and Experimental Robotics

Taking a completely hands-on approach, using cheap and easily available robotics kits, Practical and Experimental Robotics provides a detailed exploration of the construction, theory, and experiments for different types of robots. With topics ranging from basic stamp microcontrollers to biped and propeller based robots, the text contains laboratory experiments, examples with solutions, and case studies. The authors begin with a review of the essential elements of electronics and mechanics. They describe the basic mechanical construction and electrical control of the robot, then give at least one example of how to operate the robot using microcontrollers or software. The book includes a reference chapter on Basic Stamp Microcontollers with example code pieces and a chapter completely devoted to PC interfacing. Each chapter begins with the fundamentals, then moves on to advanced topics, thus building a foundation for learning from the ground up. Building a bridge between technicians who have hands-on experience and engineers with a deeper insight into the workings, the book covers a range of machines, from arm, wheel, and leg robots to flying robots and robotic submarines and boats. Unlike most books in this field, this one offers a complete set of topics from electronics, mechanics, and computer interface and programming, making it an independent source for knowledge and understanding of robotics

A Swarm intelligence based approach to the mine detection problem

In this paper, we have applied a swarm intelligence based technique to a mine detection problem. Swarm intelligence techniques are used to model robotic agents to solve the problem. Studies made on the ant colonies, which is a typical member of the family of swarms, are applied in devising the techniques for the agents. Ant colony models bestow intelligence not only at the individual level, but more at the collective level (the interactions produced by the individual members in trying to solve a common problem). An analysis of the results obtained with a computer simulation of the mine detection is also presented

Inversion Ranks for Lossless Compression of Color Palette Images

Palette images are widely used in World Wide Web (WWW) and game cartridges applications. Many image used in the WWW are stored and transmitted after they are compressed losslessly with the standard graphics interchange format (GIF), or portable network graphic (PNG). Well known two dimensional compression scheme; such as JPEG-LS and CALIC, fails to yield better compression than GIF or PNG, due to the fact that the pixel value represent indices that point to color values in a look-up table. The GIF standard uses Lempel-Ziv compression, which treats the image as a one-dimensional sequence of index values, ignoring two-dimensional nature. Bzip, another universal compressor, yields even better compression gain that the GIF, PNG, JPEG-LS, and CALIC. Variants of block sorting coders, such as Bzip2, utilize Burrows-Wheeler transformation (BWT) by Burrows M. and Wheeler D. J. (1994), followed by move-to-front (MTF) transformation by Bentley J. L. (1986), Elias, P (1987) before using a statistical coder at the final stage. In this paper, we show that the compression performance of block sorting coder can be improved almost 14% on average by utilizing inversion ranks instead of the move-to-front coding

Application of soft computing techniques to estimate the effective Young\u27s Modulus of thin film materials

This research aims at characterizing and predicting the Young’s Modulus of thin film materials that are utilized in Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Recent studies indicate that the mechanical properties such as Young’s Modulus of thin films are significantly different from the bulk values. Due to the lack of proper understanding of the physics in the micro-scale domain the state-of-art estimation techniques are unreliable and often unfit for use for predicating the mechanical behavior of slight modifications of existing designs as well as new designs. This disadvantage limits the MEMS designers to physical prototyping which is cost ineffective and time consuming. As a result there is an immediate need for alternative techniques that can learn the complex relationship between the various parameters and predict the effective Young’s Modulus of the thin films materials. The proposed technique attempts to solve this problem using empirical estimation techniques that utilize soft computing techniques for the estimation as well as the prediction of the effective Young’s Modulus. As a proof of concept, effective Young’s Modulus of Aluminum and TetrathylOrthoSilicate (TEOS) thin films were computed by fabricating and analyzing self-deformed micromachined bilayer cantilevers. In the estimation phase, 2D search and micro Genetic algorithm were studied and in the prediction phase, back propagation based Neural networks and One Dimensional Radial Basis Function Networks (1D-RBFN) were studied. The performance of all combinations of these soft computing techniques is studied. Based on the results, we conclude that performance of the soft computing techniques is superior to the existing methods. In addition, the effective values generated using this methodology is comparable to the values reported in the literature. Given a finite number of data samples, the combination of 1D-RBFN (prediction phase) and GA (estimation phase) presented the best results. Due to these advantages, this methodology is foreseen to be an essential tool for developing accurate models that can estimate the mechanical behavior of thin films

Multidisciplinary Microrobotics Teaching Activities In Engineering Education

Within the College of Engineering at RIT, a small nucleus of faculty from four different departments have been quietly developing expertise in the area of MEMS and Microrobotics by working on multidisciplinary projects of mutual interest at various levels. This paper discusses our experience in teaching microrobotics by designing multidisciplinary projects for undergraduates and their integration with research and graduate students. It also discusses the broader impact of these activities on various levels of students. The activities can be categorized in three levels: undergraduate teaching, graduate research, and clubs and organizations. This paper explores our experience in developing these projects and related research, including our lessons learned so far, and our plans for the future. Some statistical data are also provided to show the broader impact of these multidisciplinary microrobotics teaching and research activities on the students. The paper starts with a discussion on learning styles and how teamwork and multidisciplinary projects tie to theses learning styles. Then, multidisciplinary microrobotics projects are explored including their organizational structure and their ties to the existing research. In section 4 the effect of multidisciplinary microrobotics projects on research and teaching integration is discussed. Clubs and student organizations are presented in Section 5, specifically Multidisciplinary Robotics Club. Section 6 presents the broader impact of these projects in terms of curriculum development, student population, and retention. Finally, the paper is summarized and conclusion obtained from these projects and educational experiences in Section 7