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A Robotic Set-Up With Remote Access For “Pick and
Place” Operations Under Uncertainty Conditions
Aldo Balestrino
1
, Antonio Bicchi
2
, Andrea Caiti
1
, Torquato Cecchini
1
,
Lucia Pallottino
2
, Andrea Pisani
2
, and Giovanni Tonietti
2
1
Dipartimento di Sistemi Elettrici e Automazione, Pisa, Italy
2
Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca “E. Piaggio”, Pisa, Italy
Abstract. The work describes on-going work at the University of Pisa on the
field of tele-laboratories and distance learning. In particular, the group is working
at the evolution of existing tele-laboratory experiments in the field of robotics
and control into learning units of a self-consistent didactic project. The pick-and-
place system described has been designed to provide the set-up for robot arm
motion planning with specific objectives and evaluation tools.
1 Introduction
The interest of the System, Control and Robotics research group at the University of
Pisa in exploiting Internet and web-based technologies for remote instructional ac-
tivities dates back to several years ago [1]. The initial motivation has been the need
to provide hands-on experience to engineering students in mechanical and electronic
courses. The increasing number of students at the University of Pisa, coupled with con-
straints to laboratory space and budget, has led to the choice of remote, web-based
access (”tele-laboratory”) as the sole possibility to maintain a widespread didactic link
between theoretical notions and experimental practice. Through the years, a number of
didactic experiences have been developed, at different levels of difficulty and student
skills [1–4]. Similar experiences have been documented by several others laboratories
world wide. A recent review as for robotic applications can be found in [5].
Since the last year, our group is part of two related projects, sponsored by the Ital-
ian National Res. Council (CNR) and the Italian Ministry of Education and Research
(MIUR), having as objective the development of a distributed e-learning environment
in the field of robotics and automation systems. The projects team together Italian labs
with previous tele-laboratory experiences, and have the aim of steering the evolution of
tele-laboratory activities into complete learning units of a common instructional project.
Within this framework, one of the task of our group is to provide a previous avail-
able tele-laboratory set-up with tools for evaluation and student skill self-assessment.
The set-up consists of a robotic arm and of a graphic language for robot motion plan-
ning. This paper briefly describes our on-going work toward this objective. In particu-
lar, to provide a goal for the students, the set-up (mechanics, electronics and software)
has been enlarged to include a pick-and-place experiment; perturbation to the planned
Balestrino A., Bicchi A., Caiti A., Cecchini T., Pallottino L., Pisani A. and Tonietti G. (2004).
A Robotic Set-Up With Remote Access For “Pick and Place” Operations Under Uncertainty Conditions.
In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on e-Learning and Virtual and Remote Laboratories, pages 144-149
DOI: 10.5220/0001152101440149
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