This book teaches anyone interested how to build LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. He starts with an easy robot and gets to more detail in the succeeding 6 robots built in the book. The robots he presents are ...award winning robots, so he is giving away his secrets. He also teaches how to program the robots. If you are not a programmer, then you can use the code provided. He tells you what equipment you need and how to get it inexpensively. So everything is discussed that you will need to create these robots or modify his designs to create your own.
This paper presents a multi-robot simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) algorithm, suitable for environments which can be represented in terms of lines and segments. Linear features are ...described by adopting the recently introduced M -Space representation, which provides a unified framework for the parameterization of different kinds of features. The proposed solution to the cooperative SLAM problem is split into three phases. Initially, each robot solves the SLAM problem independently. When two robots meet, their local maps are merged together using robot-to-robot relative range and bearing measurements. Then, each robot starts over with the single-robot SLAM algorithm, by exploiting the merged map. The proposed map fusion technique is specifically tailored to the adopted feature representation, and takes into account explicitly the uncertainty affecting both the maps and the robot mutual measurements. Numerical simulations and experiments with a team composed of two robots performing SLAM in a real-world scenario, are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
This paper presents the experimental validation of a recently proposed decentralized control law, for the collective circular motion of a team of nonholonomic vehicles about a virtual reference ...beacon. The considered control strategy ensures global asymptotic stability in the single-vehicle case and local asymptotic stability in the multi-vehicle scenario. The main contribution of this work is to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in the presence of a number of uncertainty sources naturally arising in a real-world environment. Both static and moving reference beacons are considered, in a low-cost experimental framework based on the LEGO MINDSTORMS technology. The adopted setup features good scalability and is versatile enough to be adopted for the evaluation of different control strategies. At the same time, it represents a challenging testbed, exhibiting several issues that have to be faced in real-world applications.
The paper presents the results of experimental tests carried out to validate the performance of a decentralized control law, for the collective circular motion of a team of nonholonomic vehicles. The ...considered control strategy ensures global asymptotic stability in the single-vehicle case and local asymptotic stability in the multi-vehicle scenario. The main purpose of this work is to verify these theoretical properties in a real-world scenario. As a side contribution, a low-cost experimental setup is presented, based on the LEGO Mindstorms technology. The setup features good scalability, it is versatile enough to be adopted for the evaluation of different control strategies, and it exhibits several issues to be faced in real- world applications.
This paper presents an experimental setup based on the LEGO Mindstorms technology, suitable for the validation of cooperative control strategies for multiple vehicle systems. Despite its low cost, ...the proposed setup features good scalability and is versatile enough to be adopted for testing different solutions to a number of crucial problems arising in multi-agent systems, like formation control, motion coordination, coverage problems, etc. At the same time, it represents a challenging testbed, presenting several issues that have to be faced in a real-world scenario, such as communication constraints, control quantization, noisy measurements. As an application, the experimental validation of a recently proposed decentralized control law is presented, for the collective circular motion of a team of nonholonomic vehicles about a virtual reference beacon.
We studied the evaporation-induced pattern formation in droplets of common wheat kernel leakages prepared out of ancient and modern wheat cultivars as a possible tool for wheat quality analysis. The ...experiments showed that the substances which passed into the water during the soaking of the kernels created crystalline structures with different degrees of complexity while the droplets were evaporating. The forms ranged from spots and simple structures with single ramifications, through dendrites, up to highly organized hexagonal shapes and fractal-like structures. The patterns were observed and photographed using dark field microscopy in small magnifications. The evaluation of the patterns was performed both visually and by means of the fractal dimension analysis. From the results, it can be inferred that the wheat cultivars differed in their pattern-forming capacities. Two of the analyzed wheat cultivars showed poor pattern formation, whereas another two created well-formed and complex patterns. Additionally, the wheat cultivars were analyzed for their vigor by means of the germination test and measurement of the electrical conductivity of the grain leakages. The results showed that the more vigorous cultivars also created more complex patterns, whereas the weaker cultivars created predominantly poor forms. This observation suggests a correlation between the wheat seed quality and droplet evaporation patterns.
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