Search Results (18)

In this paper, the virtual model development and control for a BallBot Robotic System (BRS) are addressed. A virtual three-dimensional (3-D) EV3 BRS (EV3BRS) model is here developed through the Simscape^™ Multibody^™ environment from a BRS designed using the kit LEGO^® MINDSTORMS^® EV3. The mathematical model from the BRS is obtained through the Euler–Lagrange approach and used as the foundation to develop the EV3BRS Simscape^™ model. The electrical model for the motors is derived through Kirchhoff’s laws. To verify the dynamics of the EV3BRS Simscape^™ model, a Takagi–Sugeno Fuzzy Controller (TSFC) is designed using the Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) technique. Control gains are computed via Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). To test the EV3BRS Simscape^™ model under disturbances, an input voltage anomaly is considered. So, adding an $H_{\infty }$ attenuation to the TSFC ensures that the EV3BRS Simscape^™ model faces these kind of anomalies. Simulation results confirm that the TSFC with $H_{\infty }$ attenuation improves the performance under anomalies at the input in contrast with the nominal TSFC, although this latter can maintain the body of the system near the upright position also. The dynamics from the EV3BRS Simscape^™ model here developed allow us to realize how the real system will behave. Full article

Internet of Things (IoT) education is hindered by a deficiency of dynamic and interactive courses, in addition to a lack of components and difficulty in device configuration. These difficulties diminish students’ enthusiasm for IoT initiatives and reduce their drive and involvement. We designed and constructed a networked symphony orchestra using the Lego Mindstorms EV3 package as a project belonging to the IoT subject. Lego Mindstorms EV3 was selected due to its easy configuration. In this study, the knowledge obtained during the subject was utilized. In IoT courses at the University of Guayaquil, there is strong encouragement to apply the studied material to new initiatives. Through the design, the assessment of multiple technologies, and the final implementation of the project described within this paper, students were motivated for the practical application of concepts related to IoT. Full article

In this implementation, an innovative and automated measurement and educational-demonstrative resource is proposed that estimates Brewster’s angle and the index of refraction of semitransparent materials. The apparatus, built and programmed with LEGO Mindstorms model Ev3, utilizes a micro:bit board and a machine vision camera (Huskylens cam). This camera detects the intensity extinction of a reflected laser beam at the polarization angle. The Ev3 connection cables and general input/output electronic interfaces have been modified to establish communication with the intelligent brick. Upon completion, the Brewster’s angle and the index of refraction are displayed on the intelligent brick screen. It will also be shown that the percentage error corresponding to the measurement of the refractive index of a glass and acrylic sample is 1.92% and 0.47%, respectively. According to its characteristics, this resource is suitable for use in undergraduate or graduate physics and engineering laboratories/courses. Full article

A proper and complete formation in technology (science, communications, programming, robotics, Computational Thinking, etc.) must be imparted at all educational levels for a lifelong education. However, students may lose motivation or interest due to the complexity and abstraction of some of the concepts imparted. In line with this, the work at hand looks to improve the interest and commitment of students by presenting the programming concepts and contents in a practical way. The teaching–learning process is based on the development of projects about robotics, which are adapted for courses and groups of different educational levels. The Design Thinking methodology is used to impart the content. This methodology allows the students to experiment, design and test different solutions for a given problem, increasing their motivation and interest, promoting creativity, and making the students conscious of their learning process. Two different projects are considered, a simulated one based on a sensor network to localise and track a robot in a closed area for vocational education students, and an experimental one about constructing a robot with several capabilities using Lego Mindstorms for compulsory secondary education students. The results obtained over three different groups of students are analysed and compared, and show that the methodology and projects selected can be adopted and adapted for different educational levels, increasing the proficiency of the students, their development, motivation and self-learning despite the difficulty and complexity of some concepts related to computer science. Full article

Our society is immersed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution due to the fast evolution of the new technologies that are modifying the labor market. In the near future, technologies related to Industry 4.0 will produce totally new goods and services. Therefore, the educational systems should adapt their programs to the future needs of an uncertain labor market. In particular, mathematics will play a key role in future jobs and there is a strong need to connect its teaching methodologies to the new technological scene. This work uses the STEAM approach (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) along with active methodologies and educational robotics with the aim of developing a new strategy for the application of mathematics and physics in an engineering degree. In particular, a transportation challenge is posed to tackle the teaching–learning process of the Bézier curves and their applications in physics. A pilot project is developed using a LEGO EV3 robot and an active methodology, where students become the center of the learning process. The experimental results of the pilot study indicate an increase in the motivation due to the use of robots and the realistic context of the challenge. Full article

This article is a continuation and extension of research on a new approach to the classification and recognition of EEG signals. Their goal is to control the mobile robot through mental commands, using a measuring set such as Emotiv Epoc Flex Gel. The headset, despite its relative advancement, is rarely found in this type of research, which makes it possible to search for its advanced and innovative applications. The uniqueness of the proposed approach is the use of an EMG measuring device located on the biceps, i.e., MyoWare Muscle Sensor. This is to verify pure mental commands without additional muscle contractions. The participants of the study were asked to imagine the forearm movement that was responsible for triggering the movement command of the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot. The change in direction of movement is controlled by artifacts in the signal caused by the blink of an eyelid. The measured EEG signal was subjected to meticulous analysis by an expert system containing a classic classification algorithm and an artificial neural network. It was supposed to recognize mental commands, as well as detect artifacts in the form of blinking and change the direction of the robot’s movement. In addition, the system monitored the analysis of the EMG signal, detecting possible muscle tensions. The output of the expert algorithm was a control signal sent to the mobile robot. Full article

Robotic applications, such as educational programs, are well-known. Nonetheless, there are challenges to be implemented in other settings, e.g., mine detection, agriculture support, and tasks for industry 4.0. The main challenge consists of robotic operations supported by autonomous decision using sensed-based features extraction. A prototype of a robot assembled using mechanical parts of a LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotic Kit EV3 and a Raspberry Pi controlled through servo algorithms of 2D and 2D1/2 vision approaches was implemented to tackle this challenge. This design is supported by simulations based on image, position, and a hybrid scheme for visual servo controllers. Practical implementation is operated using navigation guided by running up image-based visual servo control algorithms embedded in a Raspberry Pi that uses a control criterion based on error evolution to compute the difference between a target and sensed image. Images are collected by a camera installed on a mobile robotic platform manually and automatically operated and controlled using the Raspberry Pi. An Android application to watch the images by video streaming is shown here, using a smartphone and a video related to the implemented robot’s operation. This kind of robot might be used to complete field reactive tasks in the settings mentioned above, since the detection and control approaches allow self-contained guidance. Full article

This paper presents a new approach to the issue of recognition and classification of electroencephalographic signals (EEG). A small number of investigations using the Emotiv Epoc Flex sensor set was the reason for searching for original solutions including control of elements of robotics with mental orders given by a user. The signal, measured and archived with a 32-electrode device, was prepared for classification using a new solution consisting of EEG signal integration. The new waveforms modified in this way could be subjected to recognition both by a classic authorial software and an artificial neural network. The properly classified signals made it possible to use them as the signals controlling the LEGO EV3 Mindstorms robot. Full article

This paper presents a real-time global path planning method for mobile robots using harmonic functions, such as the Poisson equation, based on the Proper Generalized Decomposition (PGD) of these functions. The main property of the proposed technique is that the computational cost is negligible in real-time, even if the robot is disturbed or the goal is changed. The main idea of the method is the off-line generation, for a given environment, of the whole set of paths from any start and goal configurations of a mobile robot, namely the computational vademecum, derived from a harmonic potential field in order to use it on-line for decision-making purposes. Up until now, the resolution of the Laplace or Poisson equations has been based on traditional numerical techniques unfeasible for real-time calculation. This drawback has prevented the extensive use of harmonic functions in autonomous navigation, despite their powerful properties. The numerical technique that reverses this situation is the Proper Generalized Decomposition. To demonstrate and validate the properties of the PGD-vademecum in a potential-guided path planning framework, both real and simulated implementations have been developed. Simulated scenarios, such as an L-Shaped corridor and a benchmark bug trap, are used, and a real navigation of a LEGO^®MINDSTORMS robot running in static environments with variable start and goal configurations is shown. This device has been selected due to its computational and memory-restricted capabilities, and it is a good example of how its properties could help the development of social robots. Full article

Over the last years, mobile robot platforms are having a key role in education worldwide. Among others, LEGO Robots and MATLAB/Simulink are being used mainly in universities to improve the teaching experience. Most LEGO systems used in the literature are based on NXT, as the EV3 version is relatively recent. In contrast to the previous versions, the EV3 allows the development of real-time applications for teaching a wide variety of subjects as well as conducting research experiments. The goal of the research presented in this paper was to develop and validate a novel real-time educational platform based on the MATLAB/Simulink package and the LEGO EV3 brick for academic use in the fields of robotics and computer science. The proposed framework is tested here in different university teaching situations and several case studies are presented in the form of interactive projects developed by students. Without loss of generality, the platform is used for testing different robot path planning algorithms. Classical algorithms like rapidly-exploring random trees or artificial potential fields, developed by robotics researchers, are tested by bachelor students, since the code is freely available on the Internet. Furthermore, recent path planning algorithms developed by the authors are also tested in the platform with the aim of detecting the limits of its applicability. The restrictions and advantages of the proposed platform are discussed in order to enlighten future educational applications. Full article

LEGO Mindstorms robots are widely used as educational tools to acquire skills in programming complex systems involving the interaction of sensors and actuators, and they offer a flexible and modular workbench to design and evaluate user–machine interaction prototypes in the robotic area. However, there is still a lack of support to interoperability features and the need of high-level tools to program the interaction of a robot with other devices. In this paper, we introduce Legodroid, a new Java library enabling cross-programming LEGO Mindstorms robots through Android smartphones that exploits their combined computational and sensorial capabilities in a seamless way. The library provides a number of type-driven coding patterns for interacting with sensors and motors. In this way, the robustness of the software managing robot’s sensors dramatically improves. Full article

Currently, we are in the digital era, where robotics, with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT), is exponentially advancing, and in the technology market we can find multiple devices for achieving these systems, such as the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and so on. The use of these devices makes our work easier regarding processing information or controlling physical mechanisms, as some of these devices have microcontrollers or microprocessors. One of the main challenges in speed control applications is to make the decision to use a fuzzy logic control (FLC) system instead of a conventional controller system, such as a proportional integral (PI) or a proportional integral-derivative (PID). The main contribution of this paper is the design, integration, and comparative study of the use of these three types of controllers—FLC, PI, and PID—for the speed control of a robot built using the Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit. The root mean square error (RMSE) and the settling time were used as metrics to validate the performance of the speed control obtained with the controllers proposed in this paper. Full article

In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human–robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents. Full article

This paper discusses new ideas about the use of educational robotics in social-emotional learning. In particular, educational robotics could be a tool intended to allow children to acquire some of the basic aspects of human emotions and emotional functioning, and to understand how these relate to the mind and body. More specifically, by using robots such as the LEGO Mindstorm construction kits—which allow users to both construct the body of the robot and to provide it with a behavioural repertory—children have the opportunity to visualize (and manipulate) the relationship between the robot’s body and mind. This allows them to simulate “embodied emotional minds” and to reflect on new neuroscientific concepts regarding body-mind and cognition-emotion relationships. Full article

Robotics networks are an emerging technology that has a wide range of applications. Robots are used for many military and civilian applications. Applications such as search-and-rescue operations or area monitoring during an environmental disaster, cannot be effectively carried out by a single robot, but rather are carried out by several robots forming what is called a “robotic network”. In rescue operations, for example, robots can be used to help to discover bodies under the rubble or even to assist the injured. One of the main challenges in these applications is how to deploy the robots without central coordination. Virtual force (VF) technique appears to be one of the prominent approaches to perform multi-robot deployment autonomously. However, the effectiveness of this approach depends on how its parameters are calibrated in order to achieve the required deployment. There are two important factors: attractive force ( $w_a$ ) and repulsive force ( $w_r$ ). In this work, we investigate the best settings of these two factors in order to accommodate different kinds of scenarios. Additionally, and for the first time, an energy-aware virtual force approach is proposed to balance energy consumption among deployed robots and consequently maximize the network lifetime. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to study and explore the effectiveness of the proposed settings. Finally, a proof of concept experiment using Lego^TM Mindstorm robots is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of these settings. Full article