Proposal of a new real-time cooperative challenge in mobile robotics

• Author(s): Costa, Paulo ; Moreira, António ; Gonçalves, José ; Lima, José
• Date: 2011
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/7109
• Origin: Biblioteca Digital do IPB
• Subject(s): Robotics; Education
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

In this paper it is presented a new robot competition that is going to be included in Robotica 2011, 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. One option of prototyping the AGVs is the use of the Lego Mindstorms NXT technology. The presented example 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.