Mechanical Technology December 2015

⎪ Innovative engineering ⎪

Above and left: Team UKZN and its Hulamin finished the 3 000 km World Solar Challenge in 13 th place, only 30 minutes behind the NWU team. His dream came true. “This is a learning project, which forms part of our long-term vision. The experience will enable us to aim for a podium position in 2017. It can be done. We have the expertise to develop our own technology further and better,” he said in advance of the race. We commend the success of both the UKZN and the NWU teams and, in the light Helberg’s accurate performance predictions for the Sirius X25, we look forward to a South African podium finish in 2017. q

to cover the distance in five days at close to the vehicle’s optimum speed of 75 km/h. “Our biggest dream will come true if we can only finish the race and at the same time be the first team ever from Africa to cross the finishing line. This will put us in the record books.”

cover 6.0 m 2 of the vehicles surface. Speaking before the race, team leader, professor Albert Helberg said that the Sirius was propelled by the amount of energy used by a hair drier (800 to 1 800 W). At the outset Helberg’s objective was

Thymio Robot collaboration at Eden College T he University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) together with the NCCR- Robotics centre in Switzerland, have

be controlled by a team of engineers and space experts from Earth. Between Mars and Earth there is a delay in video transmission (replicated at the event) and direct re- mote control is impossible. Therefore the Earth experts need to programme the ro- bots to solve the tasks. The Thymio Robot project in South Africa, headed up by Riaan Stopforth and Shaniel Davrajh from the School of Engineering at UKZN, aims to enlighten scholars on bet- ter understanding of robotics.

jointly begun work on the Thymio Robot project in South Africa, which involves learners from Eden College, Durban. A world-first international event, named ‘Remote Robotics using the Thymio 2’ (R2T2), took take place on November 4, at which Eden College was connected to schools in five other participating countries, which included Switzerland, Italy, Austria, France and Russia. Via YouTube streaming video and Skype chat, learners interacted with each other to remotely program and control robots in Switzerland using Thymio software. The event replicated a search and rescue scenario on the planet Mars. A meteorite damaged an important Martian power station and the damage needed to be as- sessed so that the main generator could be restarted. The 16 robots on the Mars site had to

Learners from Eden College, Rachel Hamilton, Resheen Ramsamy and Glenda Poswa, participated in a world-first international event, ‘Remote Robotics using the Thymio 2’ (R2T2), which took take place on November 4 and involved students in robotics from South Africa, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, France and Russia.

The Thymio robot is programmed using a graphics interface and generates the code in text on the side of the screen to allow learners to observe the commands and cor- relate them with the graphics. This allows programming techniques to be learned and programs to be modified using advanced commands. q

The collaboration with UKZN began when, Prof Francesco Mondada, a pro- fessor in Mechatronics Engineering from EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne) in Switzerland, developed an in- terest in robotics education and developed the Thymio robot as an educational tool.

Mechanical Technology — December 2015

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