4th Latin American IEEE Student

Robotics Contest
Joint with VII SBAI (Brazilian Symposium on Intelligent Automation and
II IEEE-LARS (Latin American Robotics Symposium)

Rules for the Advanced Category

Recycling Robotics
1 Recycler Robots
São Luiz is a very beautiful city situated in the Maranhão State, in the north of Brazil. Mayor Silva
has started several projects in order to get better social and environmental conditions for São Luiz. First
project that has started is for cleaning up the city. Mayor Silva has established a state company of garbage
recycling and is requesting research community to develop service robots for helping the cleaning job. Of
course, people must also act in order to making the robots task easier. The Mayor has started a huge social
movement in order to educate the population for the new garbage recycling scheme, with notes in the
television and newspapers.
Basically, the population will help robots by separating trash in red (plastic), green (glass) and blue
(paper) categories and the robots will take care of the rest. They will pick up the separated garbage from city
houses and put it in specific places in the recycling industry according to the garbage classification, which is
given based on the above garbage colors.

Figure 1 - Robot inside the starting room, in the garbage industry. Garbage bowls are shown.

Figure 2 - Room with balls (garbage to be collected).

2 The basic rule for the task to be solved

Let an autonomous robot (Figure 1), initially posted in a room inside the recycling industry. Let 3
balls (the garbage bags), say balls A, B, and C, of different diameters (dA=6.5 cm, dB=5.0cm and dC=3.5 cm),
painted with different colors (red, green and blue respecting the decreasing order of sizes, that is, cA=red,
cB=green,, and cC=blue), posted in another room (a city house). The balls are randomly distributed on the
room floor. Better specifications of the balls and robot environment are below. The robot must leave the
industry (Figure 1), enter the second room (Figure 2), find, and catch all balls posted on the room floor,
putting them on its back recipient, or finding another way to carry them. There will be only three balls on the
room floor, one of each color (or size). In the following, the robot must go to the industry room (Figure 1),
which has three reception bowls fixed on its floor, one for each ball type, of respective colors (pA, pB, pC). The
robot must put all balls in the reception bowls, solving the robotics color problem in such a way that each
bowl gets balls of its same color. The reception bowls positioning can be predefined or randomly given at the
contest start. Note that in the last case, as the robot has to determine the color of each reception bowl, the task
involves pattern recognition approaches. We believe a simple light sensor (for measuring color) and/or an
encoder (for measuring ball diameter), put at the gripper end, and/or a device for measuring weight can help
solving this task. Team strategy will determine which one to use (or all).

3 Specifications:

a) Robot
The robot must be designed and constructed, starting from zero, by the students of the team. It
can be used basic electronics and mechanics components commercially available in the market
(as gears, wheels, resistors, microcontrollers, motors, etc) as well as software functions, since
these parts are not component of any commercially available product (as for example
prototyping robotics kits as Lego, Robix, etc). Prior constructed, upgraded, robots (including
software and hardware architectures) can be used, as far as they have been constructed by
students in the institution and obey the above rules (have not used any commercially available
robotics bases and have been constructed by students in the institution). In both cases (new or
upgraded hardware and software), a report including project, parts, components, constructors,
hardware, software, main features, etc, must be written and send to the Technical Program
(responsible Prof. Leandro leandro@inf.ufpr.br). This report, besides presented at the
LARS/SBAI symposium in the category poster, will also be evaluated and judged by the
Technical Committee in order to accept (or not) team registration, deciding if the robot is
allowed to participate on the contest. The registration will be confirmed by email at most three
days after the registration period ends (see competition web site). The decision of the Committee
can be contested by the team coach, which will have to present arguments to ensure the above
conditions, in the following 2 days after the decision. After this, any decision of the Committee
can not be contested by the coach or team members or institution. Any final decisions of the
Technical Committee can not be contested. Remember the competition main idea is to promote
robotics in Latin America, to propose scientific new solutions for robotics fields, and to make
the competition a challenge between students, not to do marketing of any company, besides the
scientific advances can be used by those in future. The robot will have to fit in a box of size 50 x
40 x 40 cm, including any manipulator extended at its maximum.

b) Balls:
The balls will be made by a light, dry wood, with approximate weights of 20 to 40 grams
(smaller), 30 to 70 grams (medium), and 60 to 90 grams (bigger). Exactly weights, with
precision of 10%, will be posted with 20 days in advance on the competition home page
(http://www.dee.ufma.br/sbailars/). Spheres diameters are of (approximate) 3.5 cm, 5.0 cm, and
6.5 cm, respectively. The balls will be painted by a, not bright, colored paint (blue, red and
green). Balls will be randomly distributed in the environment. There will have only three balls in
the environment, including one ball of each color. The bigger ball is colored in red, the medium
ball colored in green and the small ball in blue.

d = 6.5cm, color = red, weight = 60 to 80 grams;

d = 5.0 cm, color = green, weight = 40 to 60 grams;

d = 3.5 cm, color = blue, weight = 60 to 80 cm.

 c) Environment
The task will need two rooms (Figures 3 and 4), each one of 100 x 100 cm, separated by a 400
cm distance (from entrance to entrance), and with a door (open doorways) of 60 cm each one.
Rooms have walls of 30 cm high, black (not bright) painted. The floor will be painted with a
white color (not bright). There will have a line (black tape) linking the rooms to each other, that
can be used by the robot to navigate from the recycling industry to the house and in the opposite
direction (Figure 4).

100 cm 100 cm

100 cm 60 cm 60 cm 100 cm

400cm

Figure 3 – Architectural scheme for rooms.

Figure 4 - Tape on the floor separating the rooms.

d) Garbage bowls
Garbage bowls will be fixed on the floor, predefined or randomly placed at the beginning of
each team contest. Bowls will be made of a hard material (preferably handled wood, constructed
using machinery). It will have external, cylindrical shape and concave interior of at least 15 cm
high by 25 cm of diameter, in such a way that at least three spheres of bigger size fit inside its
interior.

25 cm 25 cm 25 cm

15 cm 15 cm 15 cm

4 The Champion
Winner is the robot who catches all balls and put all of them in the respective bowls, in a minimum
time. First decision is the number of balls. Second is time spent in the mission accomplishment.