Abstract: The significance of this document is by demonstrating my skills in source use practices, writing practices, and engage in genre analysis. These are the three course objectives that are tied to this essay. In this essay I used databases to look for two lab reports that I can analyze and write them in an analytical way and writing key differences about them. I also used writing practices when writing this essay such as drafting, revising and editing. When drafting this document, I wrote the best part of information between the two lab reports and come up with some differences I could find before writing the final draft and writing every difference there is. My development as a writer in this essay shows that I can read two lab reports and use them as sources to analyze and know how to analyze two reports that are different from each other. I also improved my reading and writing strategies from this assignment.
Relationship of Engineering and Robotics, and it’s applications
The field of engineering has a broad and diverse of domains, for example mechanical, electrical, civil engineering, etc. One branch of engineering that is expected to have a higher demand in the future is “Robotics”. Robotics is associated with engineering applications such as the conception, design, manufacture, and operation of robots. In this lab report analysis. The use of robotics has helped humans in a variety of ways, ranging from commercial to industrial use. With the rise of technology and the internet, the demand for robots has increased much faster than average during the past 20 years, which means that many industries would need robots to assist them in projects where it’s not possible for humans to perform. In this analysis, I will analyze two lab reports that are related to engineering and robotics. The first lab report is titled “Model-driven engineering for mobile robotic systems: a systematic mapping study” (Giuseppina Lucia Casalaro, 2020) which focuses on engineering principles combined with software systems for robotics systems. The second lab report is titled “The Safety of Collaborative Robots” (Dávid Koczi, 2022) which focuses on robots in general, where they explained how to make collaborative robots safer to work with.
In their titles, the difference is that the title from Dávid’s report has every word capitalized, while Lucia’s title only has a capital letter in the first letter, and it has a colon before “a systematic mapping study.” The colon is used to expand a sentence and the author used it in an appropriate way to connect related words in the title.
The abstract from each report follows the same format, but they have some similarities that are related to each other. The first and second report provide background about robots and their uses in our daily lives. Both reports even state the purpose of their report, and what the readers are going to expect to see in their report. They even mention the results from their work, to let readers know what they are going to expect to see at the end of the report
The main difference in their abstract is that the first report uses acronyms such as MDE (Model Driven Engineering) and MRS’s (Mobile Robotic Systems) to shorten these words to let the reader know that these acronyms appear frequently in the report. The second report does shorten the word “Collaborative robot” to “Cobot”.
The introduction of each report is formatted similarly. The difference is that the paragraphs of the first report are written from left to right at the beginning of the second page, this is most likely because the author Lucia decided that the structure of their report should be from left to right because of the amount of information that will be written throughout the whole report. The first report has research questions, which are answered by performing a systematic mapping study, and were written by one of the authors who worked on this report.
In the second report, the introduction is written normally, but it also shows a graph and a picture related to collaborative robots. Both the graph and picture are used to provide setting about what they are talking about in the introduction. Overall, the second report makes a clearer introduction than the first one because of the use of the graph and picture. Both reports explain their introduction in separate ways according to each of the authors of how they wanted their section to be structured.
The materials and methods from Dávid’s report are structured by using many materials and including more than one graph, list, and statistic. All these sections tell the reader about the many databases used for compatibility with MRS’s. This report also demonstrates all the steps used to solve their “search and selection process.” The materials and methods section of Lucia’s work is completely different than the other report. The first notably differences are that Lucia’s work contains less methods than the first report. The methods used were called “Safety standards” in which the way it was structured is by creating a triangle hierarchy. The author Lucia chose to use this method, in order to separate each type of “Safety Standard” into one section from top to bottom, that way it can help industries when applying a type of safety to certain type of robot.
Both reports were structured very differently from each other, because each of the authors chose how they are going to make their report that way they want it to be. In Dávid’s report, the materials and methods had to be very long because it is a systematic mapping study and in order to make one, it must contain a lot of information and methods to be considered as one. In Lucia’s report, the materials and methods were used correctly, because the topic of their report is focused on the safety of robots, and there was no need to add much information to a general topic like this one.
The results of Lucia’s work state the answer to each research question from the introduction of the report. Each of the answers from the research questions include graphs and tables that show each of the databases, research types, and primary studies. The author has organized each result from each research question in order, it even includes graphs that reflect the answer from each research question.
The results of Dávid’s work contain applications from the safety standards presented from the last page and even included a picture that shows an example of a new experiment for a collaborative robot. Dávid explains the benefit of this study:
Looking to the future, robotic sensing is constantly evolving, both in terms of electro-mechanical systems and in terms of camera applications. On the software side, examples can be found of the application of artificial intelligence and the development of error detection systems (p.3)
The results of Lucia’s work contained many graphs and pictures. The results are about 11 pages long and the reason for their results to be that long, is because all of this was done by most of the authors in the report and they could not shorten their results for the reader to read every single answer from their research questions. The results of Dávid’s work do a better job of making a clear results page by stating the benefit of their research and even stating that with these safety standards, these can be applied to make new experiments for collaborative robots.
The conclusion from the first report states their process and main results summarized. The conclusions from the second lab report start by stating the key standards and rules applied to collaborative robots. The conclusion ends by stating, “In terms of applications and safety solutions, it can be said that they are experimenting with a solution for any application that can be solved with an industrial robot, and further, collaborative robots have appeared in various industries where they have never been used before” (Dávid Koczi, 2022, p.3).
Both reports have their own respective page length, structure and theme. Lucia’s report was very long with about 22 pages, because it focused more on research and collaboration. It even contains a lot of graphs and figures in order to give sufficient information in the report. This report might be too long for a reader to read everything, but due to the hard work of the authors of creating this report, they made it to help researchers using MDE’s and MRS’s. Dávid’s report was very short with only 4 pages long, it was more informative and required less paragraphs and figures.
One thing of note is that these reports come from different locations when these reports were written. The first report by Lucia comes from the “Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy”. The second lab report comes from the University of Szeged, Hungary. The first lab report has an appendix after the conclusion, which includes every primary study used in the report along with its authors. After the reference page, there are pictures of every author who wrote this report, including their academic background.
Another interesting difference is that Lucia’s report contains not only the primary parts of a lab report, but also contains many parts divided into sections in the introduction, and results. This lab report has a “Discussions” section where it discusses the results of the report and most of the databases used.
In conclusion, the works of Lucia and Dávid were more involved with Robotics and Engineering, despite that Dávid’s work was more focused on robots. These reports followed their own structure and information for their topic. In the report by Lucia, these researchers attempted to create a systematic mapping study for MDE’s and MRS’s in order to help researchers develop new and better MDE methods and techniques for MRS’s of the future. Their report had to be very long so that the readers could agree to use some of the new methods and techniques that can be applied to MRS’s. In the report by Dávid, the researchers were focused on creating new safety methods for robots used in industries, in order to improve the safety for robots collaborating with humans in a workspace. With one of the innovative safety methods they have used, these can be applied to new industries where they need collaborative robots for various tasks that are dangerous for humans. Even though the second lab report was very short, it was able to give useful information to many industries that needed collaborative robots the most.
Both reports have helped researchers and industries to seek innovative information in the fields of robotics and engineering. With these reports, researchers could make more innovative technological advancements in engineering in order to make the world more advanced than before. In the case of robotics, researchers could make robots more intelligent and could be used in our everyday lives in the future.
