Low‐cost solution in international robotic challenge: Lessons learned by Tuscany Robotics Team at ERL Emergency Robots 2017

Abstract

European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency Robots is an outdoor robotics contest focusing on multidomain emergency response scenarios. In this context, the deployed robots are expected to fulfill land, underwater, and flying cooperative tasks which emulate real-world situations inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident.Participation of the Tuscany Robotics Team at ERL Emergency Robots 2017 was deeply affected by damage to (and resulting unavailability of) the unmanned ground vehicle to be used in the competition. This damage occurred 3 days before the challenge. An entirely new working mobile platform was built from scratch using a low-cost chassis. It was able to compete with the other participants in the challenge and achieved various tasks (~83% of the tasks completed by the best performer).The paper provides a complete description of the work carried out and the system used during the competition. The development was based on low-cost solutions, in particular:• Adoption of open-hardware and open-software technology, providing cheap and fastprototyping solutions.• Use of smartphones, allowing sophisticated sensors to be exploited in an affordable way.• Employment of Cloud infrastructures, to reduce the computational burden of offloading heavy processes.Results of this experience represent a concrete demonstration, showing that even lowcost solutions can achieve complex tasks, such as those required for the European robotic competition. The presented lessons learned aim to provide guidelines useful for reacting to unexpected events. Finally, the team was honored with the Creativity

A Plug and Play Transparent Communication Layer for Cloud Robotics Architectures

“…in a robotic domain. Indeed, to the best of the authors' knowledge, few robotics research works have used this approach in their research ( [4,40]), still with a low number of robotic platforms. One possible direction of this work is to improve the proposed solution by adopting the current trends of networking approaches, such as the named-data-networking approach [41].…”

Systematic Mapping Literature Review of Mobile Robotics Competitions

“…It is an industrial competition focused on autonomous vehicles, which has prize money [3,4,27,33,35,39,53,59,62,66].…”

“…The 2017 ERL Emergency competitions require flying, land and marine robots acting together to survey the disaster [53,54,66,74].…”

Methods Research and Software Development for Parameters Formalization of the Assignment Task Applicable to the Target Distribution

“…It is shown that when solving the problems of object assignment, one can effectively use the power of an agent to achieve the targets. e article [14] provides an overview of the well-known works in this area of work. It is made the analysis of the problems of cooperative robots.…”

“…erange characteristic of hitting the sword and the speed of the mobile objects are considered, as shown in Figure 11. e results of the solution in the third experiment are shown in Figures 12,13,and 14. e final decision on the appointment is summarized in Table 4.…”