Performance enhancement of a mobile robot using a competition as benchmark

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Programming Mobile Robots in an Educational Context: a Hardware-in-the-loop Approach

Publication . Brancalião, Laiany Suganuma; Alvarez, Mariano José; Coelho, João Paulo; Conde, Miguel Ángel; Costa, Paulo Gomes da; Gonçalves, José

In this paper it is presented a Hardware-in-theloop (HIL) mobile robot programming approach, to be applied in a robotics educational context. The motivation to apply this approach is the fact that students can program the robots without access to the robot hardware, but still maintain some important closed loop control critical features, such as a realistic lag time and the possibility for a larger number of students to program at the same time. Therefore, the developed software is applied to the real hardware without any change. The HIL approach was applied to provide a simulation close to reality, once the processing occurs in the real robot processor and the actuation and sensorization inside the simulation, adding to the advantage to test the firmware avoiding damage in the physical robot.

2024Conference paper

Open access

Prototyping and Control of an Educational Manipulator Robot

Publication . Coelho, João Paulo; Brancalião, Laiany Suganuma; Alvarez, Mariano José; Costa, Paulo Gomes da; Gonçalves, José

This article presents the prototyping of an educational manipulator robot, based on the “EEZYbotARM Mk2” robot, tailored for first-year master’s students in the field of robotics. The project encompasses the assembly of the robot arm, computation of both forward and inverse kinematics, and analysis of two path-planning movement algorithms. These features are consolidated into an Arduino library to streamline the process for students to generate instructions for the robot. The “EEZYbotARM Mk2” features a three-degree-of-freedom revolute arm with a gripper that remains parallel to its base at all times, enhancing its suitability for educational applications such as pick-and-place tasks. The article provides detailed descriptions of the materials and methods employed, along with proposed challenges for student engagement.

2024Conference paper

Open access

Contributions to accelerating a numerical simulation of free flow parallel to a porous plane

Publication . Schepke, Claudio; Spigolon, Roberta A.; Rufino, José; Cristaldo, Cesar F. Da C.; Pizzolato, Glener L.

Flow models over flat p orous surfaces have applications in natural processes, such as material, food, chemical processing, or mountain mudflow simulations. The development of simplified a nalytical or numerical models can predict characteristics such as velocity, pressure, deviation length, and even temperature of such flows for geophysical and engineering purposes. In this context, there is considerable interest in theoretical and experimental models. Mathematical models to represent such phenomena for fluid mechanics have continuously been developed and implemented. Given this, we propose a mathematical and simulation model to describe a free-flowing flow pa rallel toa porous material and its transition zone. The objective of the application is to analyze the influence o f t he p orous matrix on the flow u nder d ifferent m atrix p roperties. W e i mplement a Computational Fluid Dynamics scheme using the Finite Volume Method to simulate and calculate the numerical solutions for case studies. However, computational applications of this type demand high performance, requiring parallel execution techniques. Due to this, it is necessary to modify the sequential version of the code. So, we propose a methodology describing the steps required to adapt and improve the code. This approach decreases 5.3% the execution time of the sequential version of the code. Next, we adopt OpenMP for parallel versions and instantiate parallel code flows and executions on multi-core. We get a speedup of 10.4 by using 12 threads. The paper provides simulations that offer the correct understanding, modeling, and construction of abrupt transitions between free flow a nd porous media. The process presented here could expand to the simulations of other porous media problems. Furthermore, customized simulations require little processing time, thanks to parallel processing.

2025Conference paper

Restricted access