| Summary: | Robotics is field dedicated to studying and engineering agents, known as robots. The technological advancements in recent years have allowed the increase in both the robot’s hardware and software complexity, allowing the creation of robotic competitions, events where engineers can put their agents to test in a series of challenges, generally supervised by referees, with public attendance. While these events act as a form of entertainment, they can also be very beneficial to both the staff and the attending public to learn more about the field of robotics, as well as the robots themselves. However, usually there’s lack of a method to provide enough information to everyone involved, since attendees often don’t get the chance of getting closer to the robots, researchers often need to interrupt the competition staff to learn more information and referees might face ambiguous situations. This dissertation explores a new method of amplifying what users are able to see during the competition, utilizing an Augmented Reality (AR) marker-based approach and exploring how this medium can influence the competitions themselves. As a proof-of-concept, an application was created, featuring options suitable for everyone involved that could present more information to the users, developed for mobile devices used daily, such as smartphones, aimed at providing users with an effective way of obtaining more information about the robots and robotics competitions. To test its efficiency, the application was tested among a group of users with different scientific knowledge. Also, the feedback from participants in such competitions was incorporated in the dissertation, as well.
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