Sparkling Science

The research cooperation between the Isntitute of Automation and Control, the KISS institute of Practical Robotics and the TGM – Institute of Technology will be represented at the RiE2011 in Vienna (15/16. September 2011). The paper written by Gottfried Koppensteiner, Munir Merdan and David P. Miller has been accepted for a oral presentation at the Session about Teaching Robotics in Schools.

ID 41: Teaching BOTBALL and researching DISBOTICS
Koppensteiner Gottfried, Munir Merdan, David P. Miller
Vienna University of Technology, Austria
The enrollment in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) is not keeping pace with the need, especially in the robotics sector. The university level is often too late for someone to start their engineering education and therefore universities must recruit students well before they are about to start university study. This paper shows how to bridge the gap between research and high school education using BOTBALL combined with an actual research topic: The disassembly of goods with autonomous mobile robots. This paper is based on an extensive cooperative experience between the Vienna University of Technology and the Vienna Institute of Technology (TGM) and a successful first BOTBALL Season with the students of the TGM. It shows the possibilities of BOTBALL, the influence of other courses and a way to start with robotic beginners and end with research experts by the example of the DISBOTICS Project.

see more information at: http://www.rie2011.org/home/programme/

What a great Happening! After the first little steps within the tournament, the Austrian Team was qualified for the alliance matches, which means that they have to compete together with another team. Therefore they redesigned their robot and as a result –> they were successful!

After stapling the blocks, nearly everybody comes to give warm congratulations. At the awards ceremony our team get a award for “Most promising use of Technology” and as they went out to take their award, they get standing ovations from the members of the Botball Community!

In a resumee it can be said that the first participation at this great conference was a success. Not in a final-standings point of view, but in an educational one. The team has learned a lot and we have met new friends from America and even Europe (Poland and Greece). It was nice to see how other countries work with pupils, how they get them excited about research and for a study in the STEM fields.

We finally would like to thank the KIPR Team for the organsiation of this great event and their help to start the first Austrian Botball Team. We hope to see them next year at our first official European Regional Botball Cahmpionship in Vienna (this Event will be part of the Disbotics Project)!

The students from the Vienna Institute of Technology have written a research paper together with the researchers from the Vienna University of Technology and has presented the paper at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics 2011 (GCER2011) in Anaheim, California (of course in English).

The research paper “Knowledge based agent architecture for high level control of mobile robots” was the result of their year/diploma project. They have implemented a rule-based system within software-agents on the CBC Controller, which is used for all robots in the Botball initiative (www.botball.org). It showed that it is possible to use semantic technologies to do high level decisions for the control of mobile robots and is therefore a first step to reach the research aim of the DISBOTICS-project. Of course, such a systems needs lot of resources and the CBC controller will be very slow, but the next steps are to improve the overall efficiency of this system for this particular controller.

DISBOTICS compete at the Botball International Tournament

64 teams taking place in this tournament, 61 from the USA and 3 international teams. We are the first team from Austria at the global conference  and there is also one team from Poland and one team from Qatar.

According to the speed-problems with the CBC Controller the team competes without the rule-based agent system at this tournament. All the other teams are using the C-Language and the KISS-C IDE to program their robots. According to the group´s JAVA-based solution, they´re using a JAVA-behavior-based system, based on CBCJVM and programmed on their own to control their robots with behaviours. After some problems with the different light conditions between the robotics lab in Vienna and this venue in the “seeding rounds”, we hope to compete a little bit better in the following double elimination rounds. See here some pictures of our team by calibration work during the open practice.

Today the newspaper “der Standard” reports about the sparkling science project DISBOTICS….

An der TU Wien lernen Roboter, alte Handys und Fernseher zu zerlegen, um Rohstoffreserven zu gewinnen.

Jedes Jahr ein neues Handy, und das alte landet auf Deponien, wo hochgiftige Stoffe verbuddelt werden. “Wirklich schade, dass so viel zerstört wird” , findet Gottfried Koppensteiner, Forscher am Institut für Automatisierungs- und Regelungstechnik der TU Wien. Diese Ansicht war der Ausgangspunkt eines vom Wissenschaftsministerium geförderten Forschungsprojekts zur Entwicklung von Robotern zur Rohstoffrückgewinnung, bei dem im Rahmen der Initiative Sparkling Science auch Schüler des Wiener TGM mitarbeiten.

(Quelle: http://derstandard.at)

Read the whole article online –> In-Roboterarmen-statt-auf-der-Muelldeponie

Happy new Year!

Gottfried Koppensteiner

At 2^nd November Prof. Dr. David Miller from the Oklahoma University gives us an introduction into Robotics and the Botball program. Researches as well as students participate on it. First, Mr. Miller gives us some insight in Robotics, the problems and concepts and about the possibility with the Botball controller CBC V2.

We saw very fast, that Mr. Miller is really an expert in the fields of educational robotics and because of this we proceeded very easily, which means that we were able to program the CBC and to do some experiments very early. Learning by doing & keep it simple and stupid (This is what KISS actually means) – that’s the philosophy of the Botball program.

First we learned about the KISS-C Development Environment and how to simulate the behavior of the robot. Then the students of the TGM built up four identically robots, so that the researches of the Technical University where able to proof their programs in real life. And this was a really exciting way of learning robotics.

Just after some trial & error – follow lines in different colors with cameras and also with light sensors – where successfully implemented and tested.

Just few changes to the student’s first robot (the one which follows the blue ball) and the robot were able to follow the lines with its light sensor.

At the end of the day, the students of the TGM used the time for some discussions with Prof. Miller. And I´m sure that they´ve learned a lot in these discussions.

Gottfried Koppensteiner