A robot called Pauri

As simple as following a line in Piura – as passionating as discovering another world… like Mars?

 

PASADENA, California – The robots Spirit and Opportunity finish their mission. It has been four hard-working years, but the solar light has declined too much that it doesn’t stimulate their photoelectric cells yet, and they take a deserved break. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in the U.S., it’s possible to breathe quietly and say – mission accomplished.

 

Spirit and Opportunity are millions of miles far away the Earth –Mars, to be exact—and their purpose has been to explore part of a planet where the atmosphere is too rarefied for the human being can survive itself. They arrived in 2004 and they were focused on exploring an environment that seems to have much in common to our planet. The answers, when the mission was over in 2011, were just up to know.

 

Thousands of miles from JPL, Pauri [Paawri] also takes a deserved break. It never ran along the reddish Martian soil but it is opening an opportunity field for the robotics in Piura. Pauri, like Spirit and Opportunity, is a robot which principle is not quite different – it has to follow a track previously marked on the floor.

 

“The fundamental job of a mobile robot is displacing on a known or unknown environment,” its creator Pier Guidino Aguirre, 18 in 2011, says. This Paita-native dude overcame other 15 people older than him, in August 2011, at a line-following robots (LFR) pageant summoned by the National University of Piura (UNP, as its initials in Spanish)

 

“In the beginning, I was a little scared by the other runners because as I was very young, I thought I wouldn’t have the necessary tools to make it,” he manifests to FACTORTIERRA. “Then, I realized it’s something must not happen to me ever and never because if I’m confident of myself and my knowledge, the scare must take aside,” he continues.

 

Pier was a student of University of Piura in Piura’s (Udep) High Technological School and he was the only runner of that campus. Who figures out he went ssuch as a brave Little tailor, is wrong. Before the contest, he was nervous despite in previous hours, he and his advisor, Engineer Joe Pisconte Reyes, were going to win.

 

But let’s say that Mr Pisconte was one of his inspirers because he already brought a first place at 2010 Intercon Award. His other engine was his family: “It supported me, it motivated me to move forward, and it trusted much in me.” Pauri is not an acronymof any kind. Its name comes from Piura but changing two of its letters out of its place.

 

A lot of zeros and ones

The LFR’s are not new in robotics, either too much sophisticated that they only can operate in a hostile mean like Mars. Pauri is an autonomic mobile robot that has two motors easing it to do any kind of track and three infrared sensors set 0.2 inches above the soil for detecting colors between black and white.

 

“It was designed and developed by using digital electronics for taking decisions –forward, left, right, reverse—providing it the enough intelligence level to follow the track of a black line over a white surface,” Pier explains. “The most complicated model is at a seaport in england, and the most extreme ones can adequate to deactivate bombs, and, of course, it’s the ideal ally in hostile environments for the human being.”

 

“It wasn’t easy  to get all the features.” Pauri was build in two months, Pier tells. “I used three sensors, two motors with their reducer boxes, a free wheel, two tires, an acrylic plate, a 9-volt battery, resistances, LED’s, condensers, integrated circuits, molex, terminals, one voltage reducer, one driver, fflexible tiny wire, boards, and tin, just to enumerate the most important ones.”

 

Up to now, no one has been interested in allowing to develop his idea and putting it to serve the industry there in the department or outside it. “Since a child, I wished to build and to have an own robot. I was fascinated about the advances the science made in terms of robotics, and I wondered if my turn would come anytime for developing a robot by myself.”

 

Pier wants now to break the almost unexistent boundaries of scientific research in Piura, like Spirit and Opportunity, that were product of people who didn’t only dream but had the space and the confidence to put, and to put them, purposed to amplify the frontiers of our knowledge. That’s the line Pauri follows up.

 

“That moment arrived and combining the abilities and skills it owns, with the knowledge I have granted at Udep, I decided to make one by myself,” he reminds us. Will he have to knock on JPL doors for feeling his invent makes a sense, or will we have to go until Mars for learning it?

 

Thanks elena Belletich for her collaboration. LFR initials were adopted by the editors to refer of line-following robots. © 2011 Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved.