Abstract:

Industrial engineering curricula still do not often cover artificial intelligence, which is a cornerstone of Industry 4.0. Meanwhile these curricula are updated to respond to new requirements, the final project becomes an ideal venue to train students in new competences needed in their future performance as engineers in the new industrial era's interconnected smart factories. The present article proposes that the LEGO Mindstorms educational platform be used for projects involving artificial intelligence solutions.

There are two main reasons for this:
(i) this robotics kit includes interconnectable parts, sensors and servomotors to build a custom robot adapted to each project's needs, and
(ii) the programmable block of the kit features wireless communication to remotely receive instructions.

All this greatly expands the robot's processing capacity, allowing solutions based on artificial intelligence algorithms to be tested on a real device. A final degree project developed at the School of Industrial Engineers in Albacete is reported to illustrate the possibilities of combining the robotic platform and a PC. Thus, a prototype of an autonomous vehicle is built using the LEGO Mindstorms NXT version. The project also integrates a smartphone acting as a vision camera to transmit images to the PC through an HTTP stream. The control program developed under MATLAB processes the data from the robot's sensors and the vision camera. As a key aspect, the program processes the images using a convolutional neural network previously trained to classify traffic signs. The control program transmits the appropriate commands to drive the robot via Bluetooth based on the detected signal. This project helps students to train concepts of robotics, communications, programming and artificial intelligence necessary for their future performance in the Industry 4.0 sector.

Keywords:

Industry 4.0, Innovation, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Robotics, LEGO Mindstorms, MATLAB.