About

Visegrad Robotics Workshop

In the year 2013 the new initiative of the Belarusian, Czech, Polish and Slovak partners will begin. Organizational and financial support is provided by Brest University of Technology, Robonika, Lodz University of Technology, Robotika.sk and International Visegrad Fund under Standard Grant No. 21220294. We will organize four workshops in 3 Visegrad countries and Belarus. We will present different approaches to teach robotics at the university level and to popularize robotics among young enthusiasts. Workshops will be accompanied by large robotic competitions or conferences (e.g. Istrobot 2013, Czech Robotic Day, Robotics in Education, Robotour) giving additional experience for the participants. Various ideas of robotic events will be spread among Visegrad countries and beyond, strengthening our activities and exchanging best practices.

Calendar of events:

Slovak Workshop will be practically oriented; students will learn with Lego Mindstorms and with the robotic platform Acrob. Participants will modify the control structure by adding more sensors and additional electronic components, and working with software. There will be also exercises in tele-operated robotic lab. Istrobot 2013 is the next edition of the popular robotic competitions containing 4 categories: Linefollower, MicroMouse, Ketchup House and Freestyle.

Robonika will organize the Czech Robotic Day 2013 and a workshop associated with it. The following contests will be held: "Art, Robots & Entertainment", Bear Rescue, Ketchup House, Line Follower, Mini Sumo, RoboCarts. The workshop will focus on robot operational principles, control systems, and their practical implementation. Presented curricula are already used by several teachers and teams from hobby clubs.

Lodz University of Technology Workshop will be based on two robotic platforms: LabVIEW Robotics and Micromouse Robots  Students get familiar with LabVIEW graphical programming environment; work with RealTime and FPGA based systems being brains of the mobile robots. Micromouse  Robots are small differential-driven robots with Arduino-based controllers and several sensors, which can be configured for the specific application. In September 2013 Lodz will also host the 4th Int. Conference on Robotics in Education and Robotour contest.

Brest University of Technology Workshop will be focused on studying the architecture of robots (electronics, software), intelligent control (neural network, genetic algorithm, Bayes networks, reinforcement learning), modeling of robots (in Player/Stage, MobileSim) and practical application of robots (Robotics in education, robot-guide, robot-defender). Also students will work with basics of the computer vision (OpenCV), approach to the processing of sensor information. In electronics, the special attention will be given to Arduino-board and its analogs. BrSTU developed its own version of a board and uses in robots.