Robo-Surveillance of a Solar Park for a Workshop in Interdisciplinary Education

The field of intelligent mobile robotics is highly interdisciplinary by nature, spanning interest from mechanical, electric, and electronic engineering to computer science, physics, cognition and neuroscience. Yet, there are few opportunities during undergraduate education to experience work and communication between students from these disciplines. For this reason, we devised a scenario where knowledge from these diverse disciplines could be demonstrated and used for experiments by students during a one-week workshop. This scenario consists of trials with two different robots. The first phase of the trials makes use of a simple differential robot where the basics of electronics, communications over WiFi and Bluetooth networks are taught. The second phase makes use of an omnidirectional robot whose task is to survey a solar park to detect dusty solar panels. Its job is only to navigate through the park detecting the panels and sending one photo of the panel to a nearby workstation. This workstation processes the images captured by the small robots to detect whether the panels in them are clean or dusty, using a U-net neural network. Here we report our experience on the first two editions of this interdisciplinary workshop.