Manufacturing education and training resorting to a new mobile robot competition

Abstract

In this paper it is discussed the educational, research and development outcomes that are expected to achieve from a new robot competition, proposed and conceived by the authors, that was recently included in Robotica (the main Robotics Portuguese Competition). The robot competition takes place in an emulated factory plant, where Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) must cooperate to perform tasks. To accomplish their goals the AGVs must deal with localization, navigation, scheduling and cooperation problems, that must be solved autonomously. The presented robot competition can play an important role in education due to the inherent multi-disciplinary concepts that are involved, motivating students to technological areas. It also plays an important role in research and development, because it is expected that the outcomes that will emerge here, will later be transfered to other application areas, such as service robots and manufacturing.