Arena – About SyRoTek

The SyRoTek arena is an enclosed space dedicated for robots. It is not only the space itself, but it also consists of necessary supporting subsystems, e.g. charging, lighting, visualization etc. The size of the arena is dimensions 3.5 m x 3.8 m.

The robot working space is a flat area with an outer barrier 18 cm tall. Additional 13 cm tall obstacles are placed inside. Some obstacles can be remotely retracted, while the rest of them is fixed, however all obstacles can be manually removed in order to create various configurations.

Robot Charging Docks

For each robot in the arena a dedicated docking space is allocated. In the docking place a recharging mechanism is available. Thirteen recharging docks are placed at one side of the arena that is well accessible for human personnel. A space of docks is separated from the working space and robots are exclusively controlled automatically in this part of arena.

The charging mechanism is based on two flexible bronze contacts pushed by springs against gilded metal pads on the bottom of the robot

Each dock provides 2-Ampere power supply, allowing the robot to fully recharge in about 1--2 hours.

Reconfigurable obstacles

The arena was designed to be reconfigurable without need of human attendance. This feature was achieved by installing several moving obstacles, allowed to be retracted under the surface. The presence of moving obstacles allows to prepare more environment configurations in the arena before a user starts solving his/her task, as well to define tasks with dynamically changing environment. Moreover, the arena workspace may be divided into several mutually separated closed areas to create robot working spaces for several users without affecting each other.

Each obstacle needs about 10 seconds to extrude or retract.Due to a power supply current limit, all obstacles cannot be displaced simultaneously and therefore additional obstacle management is required. A noise generated by the obstacles when displacing is nonneglible, so frequency of the arena reconfiguration should be minimized.

Robot Localization and Visualization

A global localization system for robots is an important functionality of the arena. A robot identity together with its position and orientation is estimated using an image processing method. A grayscale camera mounted above the arena working space provides an image in which patterns on the top of robots are recognized. These patterns consist of outer ring used for position and orientation estimation and inner code-circle for identification of a single robot.

An Unibrain Fire-i 820b camera connected by the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interface is used with 1600 x 1200 pixels resolution at 12 frames per second. The localization algorithm is executed on a dedicated computer, however we intend to transfer localization algorithm to an embedded FPGA device. An achieved accuracy of the localization is about 3 mm in position estimation and 5 degree in robot orientation.

Several other color cameras are mounted above the arena ground, providing view of the arena. A user may observe robots in the arena thru visualization components of a user interface, or he can download video streams of the performed experiments later. The visualization cameras are connected via an Ethernet interface, which provides also a power supply.

Details on the arena and localization can be found in section 5 of the overview paper [1].

[1] Jan Chudoba, Jan Faigl, Miroslav Kulich, Tomáš Krajník, Karel Košnar, Libor Přeučil, A TECHNICAL SOLUTION OF A ROBOTIC E-LEARNING SYSTEM IN THE SYROTEK PROJECT. In Proc. of 3rd international conference on computer supported education. 2011.