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Bot’n roll robotic kit after fully assembled and with extras 

Bot’n roll robotic kit after fully assembled and with extras 

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This book contains a selection of papers accepted for presentation and discussion at ROBOT 2015: Second Iberian Robotics Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal, November 19th-21th, 2015. ROBOT 2015 is part of a series of conferences that are a joint organization of SPR – “Sociedade Portuguesa de Robótica/ Portuguese Society for Robotics”, SEIDROB – S...

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... to pick a song and to program their robot to the song rhythm. Some teams use for this task the mixture of their robot dressing with a favourite song. All together, with some funny robot movements, the 60 seconds of dance on the stage can make the crowd laugh out loud. This third task makes teams to join the previous tasks into a single one: craftsman work, choreography, robot programming and loads of creativity. Since the working area of the event is open space, and four teams share the same workbench, it is interesting to observe how youngsters learn with each other, copying the best ideas, having their own ideas, in a friendly and peaceful environment. A University of Minho spin-off company named SAR – Solutions for Automation and Robotics, especially developed the robotic kit for RoboParty. These alumni were aware of the organisation’s intention and they helped on the launch and support of this event. Nowadays this robotic kit is commercially available and the company is still involved in the event. At each edition, a workshop is reserved inside the working area where they can provide close support to the needs of the participants. Having such young people handling for the first time of their lives small electronic components, one could expect to have damaged components, bad soldering or a component soldered in the wrong place. SAR company’s technicians are there during the whole event as they provide the last resort help to ensure every single robot will work in the end. This is one of the Organisation’s assurances to the participants and this has been achieved so far. The kit contents are all the mechanical and electronic parts to build the robot as shown in Fig. 14. The complete assembled robot with some of the extras is shown in Fig. 15. All the cables and chargers are supplied in the BOX so that the robot can start working immediately. After RoboParty, the robot belongs to the team and they can take it home/school. C. Extra sensors The robotic kit comes with the basic frontal infrared sensors allowing the robot to avoid obstacle collision. Some extra sensors designed for the kit can be acquired before or during the event. One very required sensor is the line following. With this sensor, attached underneath, the robot can be programmed to follow a dark line in a contrasting background. Together with obstacle avoidance, the robot becomes a complete autonomous traveller when well programmed. A special track and trial was created in order to allow teams to program and experiment their robot to achieve the best times (Fig. 16). Other extra sensor available with the robotic kit is a RGB colour sensor that returns a value with the colour read by the sensor. It can also be attached underneath the robot, side by side with the line follower. Teams may use this sensor to increase their capability in the different trials such as the dance trials, where the robot can follow different coloured lines on the floor, allowing a much richer and precise dance performance. Some other add-ons can also be acquired with the robotic kit such as a RGB LED, a loud speaker and a LCD 20x4 characters ...

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