Projects

The importance of short term memory (working memory) in a student's success has been shown previously. In this project we are interested to evaluate the effect of games, related to memory, on short term memory.

Air pollution in metropolitan areas causes dirt to accumulate on highway lighting bulbs. The bulbs should be cleaned on a regular basis in order to maintain the required illumination in the highways without resorting to more power consuming light bulbs. Manual cleaning of highway lighting bulbs is a dangerous and traffic disturbing task. To address this problem Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Tehran has developed a wheel-based pole climbing robot named University of Tehran Pole Climbing Robot (UT-PCR). UT-PCR consists of a climbing platform with two manipulators for washing the lighting bulbs. The climbing platform itself consists of a triangular body and six limbs with ordinary wheels at their tips. The three lower wheels are actuated with DC motors and thrust the robot up the pole. The three upper limbs have passive wheels and act just to increase the system stability. By its design, UT-PCR has a number of advantageous features in comparison to existing pole climbing robots: Its weight is reduced by being nonholonomic and underactuated, which gives it full maneuverability with fewer actuators. It is a fast moving robot because of using wheels for both grasping and climbing the pole. It is fail-safe because of its auto-locking feature and the fact that the pole always passes through the robot platform. It is capable of climbing stepped poles with circular or near circular cross sections because of suspension by springs. It is capable of climbing nonferrous as well as ferrous poles since it does not depend on magnetic forces for gripping the surface.