Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around Educational Robotics (ER), this paper attempts to re-approach this area by suggesting new ways of thinking and exploring the related concepts. The contribution of the paper is fourfold. First, future readers can use this paper as a reference point for exploring the expected learning outcomes of educational robotics. From an exhaustive list of potential learning gains, we propose a set of six learning outcomes that can offer a starting point for a viable model for the design of robotic activities. Second, the paper aims to serve as a survey for the most recent ER platforms. Driven by the growing number of available robotics platforms, we have gathered the most recent ER kits. We also propose a new way to categorize the platforms, free from their manufacturers’ vague age boundaries. The proposed categories, including No Code, Basic Code, and Advanced Code, are derived from the prior knowledge and the programming skills that a student needs to use them efficiently. Third, as the number of ER competitions, and tournaments increases in parallel with ER platforms’ increase, the paper presents and analyses the most popular robotic events. Robotics competitions encourage participants to develop and showcase their skills while promoting specific learning outcomes. The paper aims to provide an overview of those structures and discuss their efficacy. Finally, the paper explores the educational aspects of the presented ER competitions and their correlation with the six proposed learning outcomes. This raises the question of which primary features compose a competition and achieve its’ pedagogical goals. This paper is the first study that correlates potential learning gains with ER competitions to the best of our knowledge.

Autonomous vehicles integrate complex software stacks for realizing the necessary iterative perception, planning, and action operations. One of the foundational layers of such stacks is the perception one which is comprised of localization, detection, and recognition algorithms for understanding the location and the driving environment around the vehicle. More precisely, localization aims to identify the location of the vehicle on a global coordinate system and is considered one of the most critical parts in the stack since its accuracy and robustness affects the subsequent algorithms of the perception layer and also the following planning and action layers. Due to the rapid and significant interest in self-driving cars, several localization techniques have been proposed with different directions and approaches. Algorithms using prior maps are currently considered the most accurate ones and found almost in all current self-driving car prototypes. Thus, in this paper, we categorize, discuss and analyze the state-of-the-art map-based localization techniques in an attempt to examine their potentials and limitations. We first present techniques and approaches that aim to match prior maps with on-board observations from different sensor modalities. We then review methods that handle the localization problem as a probabilistic one and finally, we also go through the emerging domain of deep-learning localization algorithms and examine their potential in self-driving cars. For all three categories, we provide comparison tables and necessary insights for the optimal localization system design based on different requirements, specifications, and sensor configurations.

This article presents a comparative study between scale, rotation and translation invariant descriptors for shape representation and retrieval. Since shape is one of the most widely used image feature exploited in content-based image retrieval systems, the authors studied for each descriptor, the number of coefficients needed for indexing and their retrieval performance. Specifically, the authors studied Fourier, curvature scale space, angular radial transform (ART) and image moment descriptors for shape representation. The four shape descriptors are evaluated against each other using the standard methodology and the two most appropriate and available databases. The results showed that moment descriptors present the best performance in terms of shape representation quality while ART presents the lowest descriptor size.

Image interpolation is applied to Euclidean, affine and projective transformations in numerous imaging applications. However, due to the unique characteristics and wide applications of image interpolation, a separate study of their evaluation methods is crucial. The paper studies different existing methods for the evaluation of image interpolation techniques. Furthermore, an evaluation method utilizing ground truth images for the comparisons is proposed. Two main classes of analysis are proposed as the basis for the assessments: performance evaluation and cost evaluation. The presented methods are briefly described, followed by comparative discussions. This survey provides information for the appropriate use of the existing evaluation methods and their improvement, assisting also in the designing of new evaluation methods and techniques.

Semantic image segmentation for autonomous driving is a challenging task due to its requirement for both effectiveness and efficiency. Recent developments in deep learning have demonstrated important performance boosting in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art semantic image segmentation methods using deep-learning techniques aiming to operate in real time so that can efficiently support an autonomous driving scenario. To this end, the presented overview puts a particular emphasis on the presentation of all those approaches which permit inference time reduction, while an analysis of the existing methods is addressed by taking into account their end-to-end functionality, as well as a comparative study that relies upon a consistent evaluation framework. Finally, a fruitful discussion is presented that provides key insights for the current trend and future research directions in real-time semantic image segmentation with deep learning for autonomous driving.