José Luís Azevedo

On-Line Determination of Biomass in a Microalga Bioreactor Using a Novel Computerized Flow Injection Analysis System

A flow injection analysis (FIA) device has been developed, which is able to assay successfully for biomass in a microalga bioreactor. The device is fully computerized and is operated via diluting small aliquots of the culture followed by measuring optical density (OD); this figure is then accurately correlated with biomass, in terms of both cell number and ash‐free dry weight, during the entire culture time. Furthermore, the device is not expensive, is highly versatile, and is easy to operate owing to specifically developed, user‐friendly software. The growth rate and biomass productivity of Pavlova lutheri, cultivated under batch and semicontinuous modes, were monitored as experimental testing model.

Obtaining the Inverse Distance Map from a Non-SVP Hyperbolic Catadioptric Robotic Vision System

The use of single viewpoint catadioptric vision systems is a common approach in mobile robotics, despite the constraints imposed by those systems. A general solution to calculate the robot centered distances map on non-SVP catadioptric setups, exploring a back-propagation ray-tracing approach and the mathematical properties of the mirror surface is discussed in this paper. Results from this technique applied in the robots of the CAMBADA team (Cooperative Autonomous Mobile Robots with Advanced Distributed Architecture) are presented, showing the effectiveness of the solution.

Hierarchical distributed architectures for autonomous mobile robots: A case study

Robots are becoming commonplace in unstructured and dynamic environments, ranging from homes to offices, public sites, catastrophe sites, military scenarios. Achieving adequate performance in such circumstances requires complex control architectures, mixing adequately deliberative and reactive capabilities. This mixing needs to be properly addressed from both the software and hardware architectures point of view and, particularly, the mapping of the former onto the latter, in order to reduce mutual interference between concurrent behaviors and support the desired coordination with adequate level of reactivity. This paper discusses the benefits of using hierarchical distributed hardware architectures and presents the case study of the CAMBADA soccer robots developed at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. These robots use a distributed hardware architecture with a central computer to carry out vision sensing, global coordination and deliberative functions and a low-level distributed sensing and actuation system based on a set of simple microcontroller nodes interconnected with a Controller Area Network (CAN).

CAMBADA Soccer Team: from Robot Architecture to Multiagent Coordination

Robotic soccer is nowadays a popular research domain in the area of multi-robot systems. RoboCup is an international joint project to promote research in artificial intelligence, robotics and related fields. RoboCup chose soccer as the main problem aiming at innovations to be applied for socially relevant problems. It includes several competition leagues, each one with a specific emphasis, some only at software level, others at both hardware and software, with single or multiple agents, cooperative and competitive. In the context of RoboCup, the Middle Size League (MSL) is one of the most challenging. In this league, each team is composed of up to 5 robots with a maximum size of 50cm× 50cm, 80cm height and a maximumweight of 40Kg, playing in a field of 18m× 12m. The rules of the game are similar to the official FIFA rules, with minor changes required to adapt them for the playing robots CAMBADA, Cooperative Autonomous Mobile roBots with Advanced Distributed Architecture, is the MSL Soccer team from the University of Aveiro. The project started in 2003, coordinated by the Transverse Activity on Intelligent Robotics group of the Institute of Electronic and Telematic Engineering of Aveiro (IEETA). This project involves people working on several areas for building the mechanical structure of the robot, its hardware architecture and controllers (Almeida et al., 2002; Azevedo et al., 2007) and the software development in areas such as image analysis and processing (Caleiro et al., 2007; Cunha et al., 2007; Martins et al., 2008; Neves et al., 2007; 2008), sensor and information fusion (Silva et al., 2008; 2009), reasoning and control (Lau et al., 2008), cooperative sensing approach based on a Real-Time Database (Almeida et al., 2004), communications among robots (Santos et al., 2009; 2007) and the development of an efficient basestation. The main contribution of this chapter is to present the new advances in the areas described above involving the development of an MSL team of soccer robots, taking the example of the CAMBADA team that won the RoboCup 2008 and attained the third place in the last edition of the MSL tournament at RoboCup 2009. CAMBADA also won the last three editions

Communicating among robots in the robocup middle-size league

The RoboCup Middle-Size League robotic soccer competitions pose a real cooperation problem for teams of mobile autonomous robots. In the current state-of-practice cooperation is essential to overcome the opponent team and thus a wireless communication protocol and associated middleware are now fundamental components in the multi-robots system architecture. Nevertheless, the wireless communication has relatively low reliability and limited bandwidth. Since it is shared by both teams, it is a fundamental resource that must be used parsimoniously. Curiously, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study on the effective use of the wireless medium in actual game situations was done. In this paper we show how current teams use the wireless medium and we propose a set of best practices towards a more efficient utilization. Then, we present a communication protocol and middleware that follow such best practices and have been successfully used by one particular MSL team in the past four years.

Sensor and information fusion applied to a robotic soccer team

This paper is focused on the sensor and information fusion techniques used by a robotic soccer team. Due to the fact that the sensor information is affected by noise, and taking into account the multi-agent environment, these techniques can significantly improve the accuracy of the robot world model. One of the most important elements of the world model is the robot self-localisation. Here, the team localisation algorithm is presented focusing on the integration of visual and compass information. To improve the ball position and velocity reliability, two different techniques have been developed. A study of the visual sensor noise is presented and, according to this analysis, the resulting noise variation depending on the distance is used to define a Kalman filter for ball position. Moreover, linear regression is used for velocity estimation purposes, both for the ball and the robot. This implementation of linear regression has an adaptive buffer size so that, on hard deviations from the path (detected using the Kalman filter), the regression converges more quickly. A team cooperation method based on sharing of the ball position is presented. Besides the ball, obstacle detection and identification is also an important challenge for cooperation purposes. Detecting the obstacles is ceasing to be enough and identifying which obstacles are team mates and opponents is becoming a need. An approach for this identification is presented, considering the visual information, the known characteristics of the team robots and shared localisation among team members. The same idea of distance dependent noise, studied before, is used to improve this identification. Some of the described work, already implemented before RoboCup2008, improved the team performance, allowing it to achieve the 1st place in the Portuguese robotics open Robotica2008 and in the RoboCup2008 world championship.

Education, digital inclusion and sustainable online communities

In support of the urgent call for climate change mitigation and pursuing the vision of sustainable, circular economy, increasing number of universities have been developing courses to prepare students in meeting the growing demand for green and sustainability related jobs, which require systems perspective training in Industrial Ecology (IE) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA analyses emissions and resource extractions from mining and processing of resources (cradle) to disposal of wastes and residuals (grave) and even back to cradle. This paper plans to contribute in developing an online-based information system which provides an interdisciplinary approach to teach IE and LCA for sustainable industrial development. Specifically, the aims of this e-learning project are: (1) To develop innovative teaching and learning materials in line with flipped classroom strategies and (2) To create a one-stop Blackboard in support of learning the principles and concepts of IE and LCA for Sustainable Production and Consumption. Though the developed materials are used first to support faceto- face learning, this is being leveraged to meet demand for distance/online LCA education in the near future..

The Micro-Rato contest: a popular approach to improve self-study in electronics and computer science

Robotic competitions for students have been around for more than two decades. Although the benefits of these competitions can be exploited at various levels of education, recent examples have been following a trend towards higher complexity. In order to bring the pedagogical advantages of robotics competitions down to a level where they can be exploited by undergraduate and high school students, a somewhat different strategy is presented in this paper. Since 1995, the authors have been organising the Micro-Rato Contest of the University of Aveiro, a competition of small autonomous and mobile robots. This paper provides an overview of the contest, describing the strategy followed by the organisers, the rules and technical specifications, as well as a brief profile of some of the robots.

Rich and robust human-robot interaction on gesture recognition for assembly tasks

The adoption of robotics technology has the potential to advance quality, efficiency and safety for manufacturing enterprises, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper presents a human-robot interaction (HRI) system that enables a robot to receive commands, provide information to a human teammate and ask them a favor. In order to build a robust HRI system based on gesture recognition, three key issues are addressed: richness, multiple feature fusion and failure verification. The developed system has been tested and validated in a realistic lab with a real mobile manipulator and a human teammate to solve a puzzle game.

Skill-based anytime agent architecture for logistics and manipulation tasks: EuRoC Challenge 2, Stage II - Realistic Labs: Benchmarking

Nowadays, the increase of robotic technology application to industry scenarios is notorious. Proposals for new effective solutions are in continuous development once industry needs a constantly improvement in time as well as in production quality and efficiency. The EuRoC research project proposes a scientific competition in which research and industry manufacturers joint teams are encouraged to develop and test solutions that can solve several issues as well as be useful in manufacturing improvement. This paper presents the TIMAIRIS architecture and approach used in the Challenge 2 - Stage II - Benchmarking phase, namely regarding the perception, manipulation and planning strategy that was applied to achieve the tasks objectives. The used approach proved to be quite robust and efficient, which allowed us to rank first in the Benchmarking phase.