May I know what is your final year project?

There are many types of modern robots i.e. Robotic arm, Mobile Robot (crawler), Mobile Robot (wheeled), Humanoid robot (Android), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), Swarm robotics. What kind of robots that interests you?

If becoming a researcher/lecturer in Robotics & AI is really your ultimate aim, I can recommend your CV to a researcher in controlling UAV with Smart Material Actuator using Shape Memory Alloy. Of course, you must have a sound basic knowledge in Control Engineering and proficient in MATLAB Control System Toolbox, which I believe you have already learned the foundations in Mechatronics. Below is a video of a flapping-wing UAV.



Machine learning usually concerns the study of robotic systems that can learn from sets of data. Could you describe what kind of algorithms (e.g. Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithm, etc.) that you intend to use in your final year project?

Hi Ivanov,

How's the future of your baby Bio-Robots? Start crawling?

MicroBots = "Ants"
Victim = "Food"

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is based on the cooperative behavior of real ant colonies, which are able to find the shortest path from their nest to a food source. The idea behind ACO is based on pheromone deposit and pheromone evaporation. An ant travels from node to node until it reaches the food node. The first ant finds the food source, via any way, then returns to the nest, leaving behind a trail pheromone. Before returning to the nest node (backward node), the last ant deposits some pheromone on arcs it has visited.

Because of the increase in the pheromone, the probability of this arc being selected by the forthcoming ants will increase. After each search process, trails of pheromones evaporate, leaving only the strongest pheromone associated with good or promising paths. In short, the more pheromone deposited on the global best path, and the better the exploitation ability.



Conditions:
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(1) The location of the victim is known.
(2) The environment is known or at least partially known.

Homing Beacons
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One idea is to use IR-emitting homing beacons, i.e. the equivalent of a lighthouse. With two IR beacons with different frequencies, the robot can determine its position at the intersection of the lines from the beacons at the measured angle. The advantage of this method is that the robot can determine its position and orientation. However, in order to do so, the robot has either to perform a 360° rotation, or to possess an omni-directional vision system that allows it to determine the angle of a recognized IR beacon.



As can be seen in Figure (top), knowing only two beacon angles is not sufficient for localization. If the robot in addition knows its global orientation, for example by using an on-board compass, localization is possible (middle). When using three light beacons, localization is also possible without additional orientation knowledge (bottom). You can substitute the light beacon with Infrared (IR) beacon.