Abstract
There is an increasing demand for robotic manipulators to perform more complex and versatile tasks. In order to fulfill this need, expeditious calibration and estimation techniques are required as a first step for the correct usage of the manipulator. This article aims at finding a subset of these algorithms that could be used in a generic manipulator and should allow for its prompt use. Two models for the representation of the pose of the manipulator are described and used in the state estimation problem. The results of the implementation are tested, and some performance metrics are obtained.

Abstract
There is an increasing number of mobile robot applications. The demanding of the Industry 4.0 pushes the robotic areas in the direction of the decision. The autonomous robots should actually decide the path according to the dynamic environment. In some cases, time requirements must also be attended and require fast path planning methods. This paper addresses a comparison between well-known path planning methods using a realistic simulator that handles the dynamic properties of robot models including sensors. The methodology is implemented in SimTwo that allows to compare the A* and RRT* algorithms in different scenarios with dynamic and real time constraint scenarios. Copyright

Abstract
The micromouse competition has been gaining prominence in the robotic atmosphere, due to the challenging and multidisciplinary characteristics provided by the teams' duels, being a gateway for those who intend to deepen their studies in autonomous robotics. In this context, this paper presents a realistic micromouse simulator developed with Unity software, a widely game engine with dynamics and 3D development platform used. The developed simulator has hardware-in-the-loop capabilities, aims to be simple to use, it can be customizable, and designed to be as similar as possible to the real robot configurations. In this way, the proposed simulator requires few modifications to port the microcontroller code to a real robot. Therefore, the framework presented in this work allows the user to simulate the development of new algorithm strategies dedicated to competition and also hardware updates. The simulation supports several mazes, from previous competitions and has the possibility to add different mazes elaborated by the user. Thus, the features and functionality of the simulator can serve to accelerate the project's development of the beginning and advanced competitors, using real models to reduce the gap between the mouse robot behavior in the simulation and the reality. The developed simulation environment is available to the community.

Abstract
Most path planning algorithms used presently in multi-robot systems are based on offline planning. The Timed Enhanced A* (TEA*) algorithm gives the possibility of planning in real time, rather than planning in advance, by using a temporal estimation of the robot's positions at any given time. In this article, the implementation of a control system for multi-robot applications that operate in environments where communication faults can occur and where entire sections of the environment may not have any connection to the communication network will be presented. This system uses the TEA* to plan multiple robot paths and a supervision system to control communications. The supervision system supervises the communication with the robots and checks whether the robot's movements are synchronized. The implemented system allowed the creation and execution of paths for the robots that were both safe and kept the temporal efficiency of the TEA* algorithm. Using the Simtwo2020 simulation software, capable of simulating movement dynamics and the Lazarus development environment, it was possible to simulate the execution of several different missions by the implemented system and analyze their results.

Abstract
The pose control (position and orientation) of a robot is important to control how and when the robot gets to the desired pose at the desired time in order to perform some task. Controlling omnidirectional robots is of great interest due to their complete maneuverability. So, we use Proportional-Integrative (PI), Proportional-Derivative (PD), and Feed-Forward (FF) controllers to control the pose of an omnidirectional robot in space and in time. The proposed controller approximates the future trajectory (a subset of points) on parametric polynomials for computing the derivatives needed in the FF. In the simulations performed, it was analyzed the size of the future trajectory horizon for the controller depending on the robot's velocity, and the proposed controller was compared to PD-only and a generic GoToXY controller. The results demonstrated that the proposed controller achieves better results than the other two both in space and in time.

Abstract
Teaching based on challenges and competitions is one of the most exciting and promising methods for students. In this paper, a competition of the Portuguese Robotics Open is addressed and a solution is proposed. The Robot@Factory Lite is a new challenge and accepts participants from secondary schools (Rookie) and universities. The concepts of simulation, hardware-in-the-loop and timed finite state machine are presented and validated in the real robot prototype. The aim of this paper is to disseminate the developed solution in order to attract more students to STEM educational program.