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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT

MAJOR TEST: 02

S1/2023

ELB1502

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING ROBOTICS

Examiner1: Dr. E MIGABO

Examiner2: Mr. AM DLAMINI Marks: 50
Moderator: Mr. N MARNEWECK Weight of Assessment: 30%

INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL STUDENTS:

1. Use of a non-programmable pocket calculator is permissible.

2. Closed-book assignment.

3. Honour Pledge: I have neither given nor received any aid on the assignment.

4. Plagiarism is prohibited. Plagiarism is the act of taking words, ideas and thoughts of
others and presenting it as your own. It is a form of theft which involves several
dishonest academic activities.

5. This question paper remains the property of the University of South Africa and may
not be copied or printed.

6. Answer all questions.

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Please use the correct unique number for this assessment.

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TEST NUMBER ASSESSMENT UNIQUE NUMBER DATE

TOOL

Major Test 2 myUnisa 638786 22 May 2023

1. Introduction to Robot Control (20)

1.1. A robot is required to follow a sinusoidal trajectory given by the equation y = 5sin(2x) using closed-
loop control. If the robot has a proportional controller with a gain of 2, what is the steady-state
error in following the trajectory? (6)
1.2. What is a PID controller, and how does it work? (2)

1.3. A robot is required to move from point A to point B, where the distance between the two points
is 10 units. If the robot has a maximum speed of 2 units per second, how long will it take to
complete the task using open-loop control? (2)
1.4. What is feedback control and how does it improve robot performance? (2)
1.5. What is the concept of phase margin and how is it related to stability? (3)
1.6. A robot arm has a proportional-integral-derivative controller with a proportional gain of 2, an
integral gain of 0.5, and a derivative gain of 1. If the desired position is 10 units and the actual
position is 8 units, what is the output of the controller after 2 seconds? (3)
1.7. What is the Bode plot and how is it used in control system design? (2)

2. Introduction to Robot Vision (20)

2.1. How are images represented in computer vision? (2)
2.2. Provide examples of robotic applications that utilize machine vision. (3)
2.3. What are the primary stages of human vision processing? (2)
2.4. What are some examples of robotic applications that utilize machine vision for object
recognition? (3)

2.5. Given an image represented as a 3x3 matrix, perform element-wise multiplication by a scalar
value of 2. (3)
2.6. Given a camera with a focal length of 50 mm and an object distance of 2 meters, calculate the
1 1 1
image distance using the camera model equation 𝑓 = 𝑑 + 𝑑 ) (3)
0 𝑖

2.7. A robot is equipped with a camera that captures images at a resolution of 800x600 pixels. Each
pixel represents a 0.1 cm x 0.1 cm area in the real world. The robot needs to determine the size
of an object in the image. If the object occupies 200 pixels in width, what is its size in centimeters?
(4)
3. Robot Applications (10)
3.1. How can robotics contribute to the exploration of hazardous environments? (3)

3.2. What are the key applications of robotics in the manufacturing industry? (2)

3.3. Explain the concept of robot-assisted surgery and its advantages. (3)

3.4. Discuss the electronic components used in robotic surgical systems and their functions. (2)