Search results for " robotics"
showing 10 items of 118 documents
Educational Robotics for Reducing Early School Leaving from the Perspective of Sustainable Education
2019
Early School Leaving (ESL) is a problem for many countries and some have pledged to reduce the number of children leaving school early to below 10% by 2020. Between October 2015 and September 2017, Italy, Greece and Latvia implemented an Erasmus+ project that used robotics to reduce the risk of ESL. The effectiveness of the teaching and learning materials developed during the project and the pedagogical strategies used were examined in groups at high-risk of ESL and in the work of the teachers participating in the project. In this paper, the use of robotics to reduce the risks of early school leaving is analysed from the perspective of sustainable education. Mixed methods were used to evalu…
A Planning and Control System for Self-Driving Racing Vehicles
2018
Autonomous robots will soon enter our everyday life as self-driving cars. These vehicles are designed to behave according to certain sets of cooperative rules, such as traffic ones, and to respond to events that might be unpredictable in their occurrence but predictable in their nature, such as a pedestrian suddenly crossing a street, or another car losing control. As civilian autonomous cars will cross the road, racing autonomous cars are under development, which will require superior Artificial Intelligence Drivers to perform in structured but uncertain conditions. We describe some preliminary results obtained during the development of a planning and control system as key elements of an A…
UWSim-NET: An Open-Source Framework for Experimentation in Communications for Underwater Robotics
2019
The communication with the remotely operated vehicles (ROV) in underwater applications are usually based on umbilical cables. The increase in the number of ROVs in cooperative interventions motivates the interest in underwater wireless communications. They have a high impact in robotic applications because of their limited performance in underwater scenarios. In this work we present UWSim-NET, an extension of the simulator for underwater robotics UWSim, which is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). UWSim-NET integrates a communications module based on Network Simulator 3 (NS3) that allows to model the physical and data link layers. Experiments demonstrating the capabilities of UWSim-N…
The Acquisition of Computational Thinking through Mentoring: An Exploratory Study
2020
Educational robotics are commonly present in kindergarten and primary school classrooms, particularly Bee-bot. Its ease of use allows the introduction of computer programming to young children in educational contexts from a science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) perspective. Despite this rise, there are still few investigations that collect evidence on the effectiveness of robotic interventions. Although mentoring experiences with robotics had been carried out in educational contexts, this work explores their effect on the acquisition of computational thinking skills through mentoring. Participants from the second grade, aged seven through eight years, were exposed …
Wind gust estimation for precise quasi-hovering control of quadrotor aircraft
2021
Abstract This paper focuses on the control of quadrotor vehicles without wind sensors that are required to accurately track low-speed trajectories in the presence of moderate yet unknown wind gusts. By modeling the wind disturbance as exogenous inputs, and assuming that compensation of its effects can be achieved through quasi-static vehicle motions, this paper proposes an innovative estimation and control scheme comprising a linear dynamic filter for the estimation of such unknown inputs and requiring only position and attitude information. The filter is built upon results from Unknown Input Observer theory and allows estimation of wind and vehicle state without measurement of the wind its…
Robust Longitudinal Control of Self-Driving Racecar Models
2022
This paper focuses on the control of longitudinal self-driving racecar models with model uncertainty and pro- poses a robust solution that comprises an online disturbance estimator and a nonlinear compensation control feedback law. By modeling all uncertainty with respect to a nominal model as suitably disturbance signals and afterward exploiting unknown- input state observer theory, a lean and fast estimator is derived for the racecar model. The estimator does not require a priori knowledge of the uncertainty. Closed-loop stability of the proposed controller ensuring the asymptotic reconstruction of the system state and disturbance inputs as well as asymptotic tracking of desired longitudi…
Exploring the development of mental rotation and computational skills in elementary students through educational robotics
2022
Abstract Interest in educational robotics has increased over the last decade. Through various approaches, robots are being used in the teaching and learning of different subjects at distinct education levels. The present study investigates the effects of an educational robotic intervention on the mental rotation and computational thinking assessment in a 3rd grade classroom. To this end, we carried out a quasi-experimental study involving 24 third-grade students. From an embodied approach, we have designed a two-hour intervention providing students with a physical environment to perform tangible programming on Bee-bot. The results revealed that this educational robotic proposal aimed at map…
Robust Control of Nonlinear Systems: An Unknown Input Observer Based Approach
2023
Questa tesi propone un controllore robusto per sistemi non lineari tramite l'utilizzo di un osservatore ad ingressi sconosciuti. Attraverso un'opportuna riformulazione dinamica del modello, un generico sistema non lineare viene descritto come la somma di due funzioni, la prima lineare e nota e la seconda altamente non lineare e sconosciuta, derivante dalla conoscenza imperfetta del modello dinamico, dei parametri, o di eventuali disturbi esogeni agenti sul sistema etc., modellabili come perturbazioni (disturbi) della funzione lineare. Questa semplificazione consente una vantaggiosa descrizione dinamica del sistema in forma matriciale. Le informazioni necessarie sono stimate attraverso l'uti…
Il centro commerciale come palinsesto aumentato. Innovazioni nell’edificio pubblico
2018
L’articolo discute alcuni caratteri architettonici del centro commerciale inteso come impianto su cui la riflessione disciplinare può operare nuovi indirizzi di intervento, attraverso una lettura genealogica con particolare riferimento alla pianta. L’ideale dell’open space, ipotesi di totale libertà della pianta senza tramezzi divisori, viene acquisito negli ultimi trent’anni del Novecento dagli architetti radicali. Le supersuperfici neutre che fanno riferimento al supermercato, lo promuovono a sintesi di ogni spazialità perché ciò sia un monito, espresso attraverso l’evocazione di un universo distopico in cui ogni significato sociale si esprimerà attraverso la produzione e la vendita delle…
ROBOTIC INTERACTION AND COOPERATION. Industrial and rehabilitative applications
2014
The main goal of the thesis is the development of human-robotic interaction control strategies, which enable close collaboration between human and robot. In this framework we studied two di erent aspects, with applications respectively in industrial and rehabilitation domains. In the rst part safety issues are examined on a scenario in which a robot manipulator and a human perform the same task and in the same workspace. During the task execution the human should be able to get into contact with the robot and in this case an estimation algorithm of both interaction forces and contact point is proposed in order to guarantee safety conditions. At the same time, all the unintended contacts hav…