De la Extensión a la Investigación: Como La Robótica Estimula el Interés Académico en Estudiantes de Grado

This research examines the impact of robotics groups in higher education, focusing on how these activities influence the development of transversal skills and academic motivation. While robotics goes beyond just technical knowledge, participation in these groups has been observed to significantly improve skills such as teamwork, creativity, and problem-solving. The study, conducted with the UruBots group, shows that students involved in robotics not only reinforce their theoretical knowledge but also increase their interest in research and academic commitment. These results highlight the potential of educational robotics to transform the learning experience by promoting active and collaborative learning. This work lays the groundwork for future research on how robotics can continue to enhance higher education and motivate students in their academic and professional careers

UruBots Autonomous Cars Team One Description Paper for FIRA 2024

This document presents the design of an autonomous car developed by the UruBots team for the 2024 FIRA Autonomous Cars Race Challenge. The project involves creating an RC-car sized electric vehicle capable of navigating race tracks with in an autonomous manner. It integrates mechanical and electronic systems alongside artificial intelligence based algorithms for the navigation and real-time decision-making. The core of our project include the utilization of an AI-based algorithm to learn information from a camera and act in the robot to perform the navigation. We show that by creating a dataset with more than five thousand samples and a five-layered CNN we managed to achieve promissing performance we our proposed hardware setup. Overall, this paper aims to demonstrate the autonomous capabilities of our car, highlighting its readiness for the 2024 FIRA challenge, helping to contribute to the field of autonomous vehicle research.

UruBots UAV -- Air Emergency Service Indoor Team Description Paper for FIRA 2024

This document addresses the description of the corresponding "Urubots" Team for the 2024 Fira Air League, "Air Emergency Service (Indoor)." We introduce our team and an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that relies on computer vision for its flight control. This UAV has the capability to perform a wide variety of navigation tasks in indoor environments, without requiring the intervention of an external operator or any form of external processing, resulting in a significant decrease in workload and manual dependence. Additionally, our software has been designed to be compatible with the vehicle's structure and for its application to the competition circuit. In this paper, we detail additional aspects about the mechanical structure, software, and application to the FIRA competition.

UruBots Autonomous Car Team Two: Team Description Paper for FIRA 2024

This paper proposes a mini autonomous car to be used by the team UruBots for the 2024 FIRA Autonomous Cars Race Challenge. The vehicle is proposed focusing on a low cost and light weight setup. Powered by a Raspberry PI4 and with a total weight of 1.15 Kilograms, we show that our vehicle manages to race a track of approximately 13 meters in 11 seconds at the best evaluation that was carried out, with an average speed of 1.2m/s in average. That performance was achieved after training a convolutional neural network with 1500 samples for a total amount of 60 epochs. Overall, we believe that our vehicle are suited to perform at the FIRA Autonomous Cars Race Challenge 2024, helping the development of the field of study and the category in the competition.

Drones e Inteligencia Artificial para Investigación y Competición

This work focuses on drones or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) for use in industry in general. These vehicles have a large number of uses and potential in the industry, as a tool for civil engineering, medicine, mining, among others. However, this vehicle is limited for use indoors due to the need for GPS and it does not work indoors. In this way, this work presents a UAV that works without GPS, thus being able to be used in closed spaces for example and have good precision. The work is based on an approach that uses computer vision and GPS.