The Computer Science Department of Neapolis University in Cyprus, in cooperation with the startup company Robotics Lab, managed to win the International Competition XII ROBOTIC ARENA 2020, which was carried out in Poland at 25th January 2020.
More specifically the performance of the Robots managed to get the team in the first and second places at the highly competitive category “Line Following Turbo”. This specific category attracts the interest of the Universities, researchers and Robotics companies. Undoubtedly, the great success of the Cypriot team is a remarkable honorary distinction.
The Robots of the Neapolis University in Cyprus have managed to get the desired result using a simple low-speed microprocessor (16MHz) of the Arduino family, a low frame and refresh rate (60 fps) video camera of the Charmed Labs Company, and a simple 8-way analog output infrared sensor from the Pololu company. The rest parts of the robot have been either designed and printed in a 3D dimension printer, either developed from scratch for the specific project. The low computational cost of this proposed solution implies that this solution can easily be modified and used in other low and high computing power platforms, showing these technology ways that can easily be adopted in other sections.
The use of visual information for the monitoring of the Robot’s trajectory sets this technology as innovative. For the first time in the long story of the competition, the robotics vehicles compete using a technology that imitates the human vision. Furthermore, technologies that have been adopted in the industry of automatic car navigation, are modified in order to be used in low-cost educational robots.
The team of the Neapolis University in Cyprus consists of the postgraduate student and partner researcher Mr. Giannos Eleftheriou (CEO of Robotics Lab), Dr. Zinon Zinonos and the Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science of Neapolis University, Dr. Savvas Chatzichristofis.