In this work we present an experimental setup to show the suitability of ROS 2.0 for real-time robotic applications. We disclose an evaluation of ROS 2.0 communications in a robotic inter-component (hardware) communication case on top of Linux. We benchmark and study the worst case latencies and missed deadlines to characterize ROS 2.0 communications for real-time applications. We demonstrate experimentally how computation and network congestion impacts the communication latencies and ultimately, propose a setup that, under certain conditions, mitigates these delays and obtains bounded traffic.
This paper presents an extension of the OpenAI Gym for robotics using the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Gazebo simulator. The content discusses the software architecture proposed and the results obtained by using two Reinforcement Learning techniques: Q-Learning and Sarsa. Ultimately, the output of this work presents a benchmarking system for robotics that allows different techniques and algorithms to be compared using the same virtual conditions.
Modern computing platforms for robotics applications comprise a set of heterogeneous elements, e.g., multi-core CPUs, embedded GPUs, and FPGAs. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware devices that allow for fast and energy-efficient computation of many relevant tasks in robotics. ROS is the de-facto programming standard for robotics and decomposes an application into a set of communicating nodes. ReconROS is a previous approach that can map complete ROS nodes into hardware for acceleration. Since ReconROS relies on standard ROS communication layers, exchanging data between hardware-mapped nodes can …
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
Multi-agent systems play an important role in modern robotics. Due to the nature of these systems, coordination among agents via communication is frequently necessary. Indeed, Perception-Action-Communication (PAC) loops, or Perception-Action loops closed over a communication channel, are a critical component of multi-robot systems. However, we lack appropriate tools for simulating PAC loops. To that end, in this paper, we introduce ROS-NetSim, a ROS package that acts as an interface between robotic and network simulators. With ROS-NetSim, we can attain high-fidelity representations of both rob…
Robotic systems are more connected, networked, and distributed than ever. New architectures that comply with the \textit{de facto} robotics middleware standard, ROS\,2, have recently emerged to fill the gap in terms of hybrid systems deployed from edge to cloud. This paper reviews new architectures and technologies that enable containerized robotic applications to seamlessly run at the edge or in the cloud. We also overview systems that include solutions from extension to ROS\,2 tooling to the integration of Kubernetes and ROS\,2. Another important trend is robot learning, and how new simulato…
Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects. Adoption of soft robotics by academia and industry, however, has been slow and this is, in-part, due to the amount of hardware and software that must be developed from scratch for each use of soft system components. In this paper we detail the design, fabrication and validation of an open-source framework that we designed to lower the barrier to entry for integrating …
Many applications from the robotics domain can benefit from FPGA acceleration. A corresponding key question is how to integrate hardware accelerators into software-centric robotics programming environments. Recently, several approaches have demonstrated hardware acceleration for the robot operating system (ROS), the dominant programming environment in robotics. ROS is a middleware layer that features the composition of complex robotics applications as a set of nodes that communicate via mechanisms such as publish/subscribe, and distributes them over several compute platforms. In this paper, we…
University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；National Manufacturing Institute in Scotland（苏格兰国家制造研究所）
Simulation software is a powerful tool for robotics research, allowing the virtual representation of the real world. However with the rise of the Robot Operating System (ROS), there are new simulation software packages that have not been compared within the literature. This paper proposes a systematic review of simulation software that are compatible with ROS version 2. The focus is research in robotics arm manipulation as it represents the most often used robotic application in industry and their future applicability to digital twins. For this, we thus benchmark simulation software under simi…
Nowadays, design and development of legged quadruped robots is a quite active area of scientific research. In fact, the legged robots have become popular due to their capabilities to adapt to harsh terrains and diverse environmental conditions in comparison to other mobile robots. With the higher demand for legged robot experiments, more researches and engineers need an affordable and quick way of locomotion algorithm development. In this paper, we present a new open source quadruped robot HyperDog platform, which features 12 RC servo motors, onboard NVIDIA Jetson nano computer and STM32F4 Dis…
The study of robotic manipulators is the main goal of Industrial Robotics Class, part of Control Engineers training course. There is a difficulty in preparing academic practices and projects in the area of robotics due to the high cost of specific educational equipment. The practical classes and the development of projects are very important for engineers training, it is proposed to use simulation software in order to provide practical experience for the students of the discipline. In this context, the present article aims to expose the use of the Robot Operation System (ROS) as a tool to deve…
Universität Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）；Alias Robotics；Joanneum Research（约阿内研究所）
With its growing use in industry, ROS is rapidly becoming a standard in robotics. While developments in ROS 2 show promise, the slow adoption cycles in industry will push widespread ROS 2 industrial adoption years from now. ROS will prevail in the meantime which raises the question: can ROS be used securely for industrial use cases even though its origins didn't consider it? The present study analyzes this question experimentally by performing a targeted offensive security exercise in a synthetic industrial use case involving ROS-Industrial and ROS packages. Our exercise results in four groups…
With the increasing ubiquity of autonomous robotic solutions, the interest in their connectivity and in the cooperation within multi-robot systems is rising. Two aspects that are a matter of current research are robot security and secure multi-robot collaboration robust to byzantine agents. Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have been proposed to address the challenges in both domains. Nonetheless, some key challenges include scalability and deployment within real-world networks. This paper presents an approach to integrating IOTA and ROS 2 for more scalable DLT-based …
Controlling and monitoring complex autonomous and semi autonomous robotic systems is a challenging task. The Robot Operating System (ROS) was developed to act as a robotic middleware system running on Ubuntu Linux which allows, amongst others, hardware abstraction, message-passing between individual processes and package management. However, active support of ROS applications for mobile devices, such as smarthphones or tablets, are missing. We developed a ROS application for Android, which comes with an intuitive user interface for controlling and monitoring robotic systems. Our open source co…
In this paper, we introduce ChoiRbot, a toolbox for distributed cooperative robotics based on the novel Robot Operating System (ROS) 2. ChoiRbot provides a fully-functional toolset to execute complex distributed multi-robot tasks, either in simulation or experimentally, with a particular focus on networks of heterogeneous robots without a central coordinator. Thanks to its modular structure, ChoiRbot allows for a highly straight implementation of optimization-based distributed control schemes, such as distributed optimal control, model predictive control, task assignment, in which local comput…
A ROS~2-based Navigation and Simulation Stack for the Robotino
FH Aachen University of Applied Science（亚琛应用技术大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；The Mobile Autonomous Systems and Cognitive Robotics Institute（移动自主系统与认知机器人研究所）
Fog Robotics renders networked robots with greater mobility, on-demand compute capabilities and better energy efficiency by offloading heavy robotics workloads to nearby Edge and distant Cloud data centers. However, as the de-facto standard for implementing fog robotics applications, Robot Operating System (ROS) and its successor ROS2 fail to provide fog robots with a mobile-friendly and secure communication infrastructure. In this work, we present FogROS G, a secure routing framework that connects robotics software components from different physical locations, networks, Data Distribution Serv…
Visual programming languages (VPLs) provide coding without typing texts. VPL makes coding easy to programmers with automatically adding usually used some code structure. Beginners in coding have generally two main challenges; transforming ideas into logical expressions and syntax errors. Syntax errors are impossible with VPLs because of there is no forgotten parentheses and semicolons. VPLs provide to focus on algorithm for programmers. VPL is a new trend for educational robotic environments. In this study, Robot Operating System (ROS) compatible web based visual programming system has been de…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
This paper discusses the development of robot motion generation interface between a real-time software architecture and a non-real-time robot operating system. In order for robots to execute intelligent manipulation or navigation, close integration of high-level perception and low-level control is required. However, many available open-source perception modules are developed in ROS, which operates on Linux OS that don't guarantee RT performance. This can lead to non-deterministic responses and stability problems that can adversely affect robot control. As a result, many robotic systems devote …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
In recent years, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is developing rapidly and has been widely used in robotics research because of its flexible, open source, and extensive advantages. In scientific research, the corresponding hardware platform is indispensable for the experiment. In the field of mobile robots, PR2, Turtlebot2, and Fetch are commonly used as research platforms. Although these platforms are fully functional and widely used, they are expensive and bulky. What\u2019s more, these robots are not easily redesigned and expanded according to requirements. To overcome these limitations, w…
In this chapter we discuss the problem of master failure in ROS1.0 and its impact on robotic deployments in the real world. We address this issue in this tutorial chapter where we outline, design and demonstrate a fault tolerant mechanism associated with ROS master failure. Unlike previous solutions which use primary backup replication and external checkpointing libraries which are process heavy, our mechanism adds a lightweight functionality to the ROS master to enable it to recover from failure. We present a modified version of ROS master which is equipped with a logging mechanism to record …
Traditional software development in robotics is about programming functionality in the CPU of a given robot with a pre-defined architecture and constraints. With adaptive computing, instead, building a robotic behavior is about programming an architecture. By leveraging adaptive computing, roboticists can adapt one or more of the properties of its computing systems (e.g. its determinism, power consumption, security posture, or throughput) at run time. Roboticists are not, however, hardware engineers, and embedded expertise is scarce among them. This white paper adopts a ROS 2 roboticist-centri…
Washington State University（华盛顿州立大学）；United States Department of Agriculture（美国农业部）
Book chapter that summarizes recent research on agricultural robotics in orchard management, including Robotic pruning, Robotic thinning, Robotic spraying, Robotic harvesting, Robotic fruit transportation, and future trends.
This paper addresses the problem of improving response times of robots implemented in the Robotic Operating System (ROS) using formal verification of computational-time feasibility. In order to verify the real time behaviour of a robot under uncertain signal processing times, methods of formal verification of timeliness properties are proposed for data flows in a ROS-based control system using Probabilistic Timed Programs (PTPs). To calculate the probability of success under certain time limits, and to demonstrate the strength of our approach, a case study is implemented for a robotic agent in…
High accuracy 3D surface information is required for many construction robotics tasks such as automated cement polishing or robotic plaster spraying. However, consumer-grade depth cameras currently found in the market are not accurate enough for these tasks where millimeter (mm)-level accuracy is required. This paper presents SL Sensor, a structured light sensing solution capable of producing high fidelity point clouds at 5 Hz by leveraging on phase shifting profilometry (PSP) codification techniques. The SL Sensor was compared with to two commercial depth cameras - the Azure Kinect and RealSe…
We are witnessing a rapid increase in real-world autonomous robotic deployments in environments ranging from indoor homes and commercial establishments to large-scale urban areas, with applications ranging from domestic assistance to urban last-mile delivery. The developers of these robots inevitably have to make impactful design decisions to ensure commercial viability, but such decisions have serious real-world consequences. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for such projects to face intense bouts of social backlash, which can be attributed to a wide variety of causes, ranging from inappropr…
Making Robots Play by the Rules: The ROS 2 CLIPS-Executive
Knowledge-Based Systems Group, RWTH Aachen University（基于知识的系统组，亚琛RWTH大学）；Chair of Machine Learning and Reasoning (i6), RWTH Aachen University（机器学习与推理（i6）教授席位，亚琛RWTH大学）；MASCOR Institute, FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences（MASCOR研究所，亚琛应用科学大学）
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Experiments using large numbers of miniature swarm robots are desirable to teach, study, and test multi-robot and swarm intelligence algorithms and their applications. To realize the full potential of a swarm robot, it should be capable of not only motion but also sensing, computing, communication, and power management modules with multiple options. Current swarm robot platforms developed for commercial and academic research purposes lack several of these critical attributes by focusing only on a few of these aspects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the HeRoSwarm, a fully-capable swarm ro…
In industrial applications, security and trust in the system are requirements for widespread adoption. Blockchain technologies have emerged as a potential solution to address identity management and secure data aggregation and control. However, the vast majority of works to date utilize Ethereum and smart contracts that are not scalable or well suited for industrial applications. This paper presents what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first integration of ROS 2 with the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. With a framework that leverages Fabric smart contracts and ROS 2 through a Go applicati…
University of Bridgeport（布里奇波特大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of evolutionary robotics for the synthesis of robots control and morphology. The motivation of developing evolutionary soft computing techniques to that can generate task oriented structures for morphological robots makes the domain of soft robotics worthy of serious investigation and research, and hence this article summarizes an important volume of research for a compu…
A unified mathematical model for synchronisation and swarming has recently been proposed. Each system entity, called a "swarmalator", coordinates its internal phase and location with the other entities in a way that these two attributes are mutually coupled. This paper realises and studies, for the first time, the concept of swarmalators in a technical system. We adapt and extend the original model for its use with mobile robots and implement it in the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2). Simulations and experiments with small robots demonstrate the feasibility of the model and show its potential…
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)（意大利理工学院）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
This paper shows and evaluates a novel approach to integrate a non-invasive Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) with the Robot Operating System (ROS) to mentally drive a telepresence robot. Controlling a mobile device by using human brain signals might improve the quality of life of people suffering from severe physical disabilities or elderly people who cannot move anymore. Thus, the BCI user is able to actively interact with relatives and friends located in different rooms thanks to a video streaming connection to the robot. To facilitate the control of the robot via BCI, we explore new ROS-based…
In this paper, we report on our use of cloud-robotics solutions to teach a Robotics Applications Programming course at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). The usage of Kubernetes based cloud computing environment combined with real robots -- turtlebots and Niryo arms -- allowed us to: 1) minimize the set up times required to provide a Robotic Operating System (ROS) simulation and development environment to all students independently of their laptop architecture and OS; 2) provide a seamless "simulation to real" experience preserving the exciting experience of writing software interac…
Swarm robotics is a creative method of organizing multi-robot structures, consisting of many basic robots influenced by communal insects. The greatest astonishing attribute of swarm robots is their capacity to function together to accomplish a collective objective. This paper addresses the list of current surveys, problems and algorithms that were stimulated in the research of Coordinated Movement in Swarm robotics. Algorithms for swarm robotics movement are contrasted, considering the swarm micro-robots to accomplish aggregation, creation, and clamouring by contrasting the relative computatio…
This work provides an extension of Ardupilot's capabilities to allow researchers to develop swarm robotics applications in Robot Operating System(ROS)/Gazebo simulations. Ardupilot is a tool used for autopilot functions in autonomous air, land and underwater robots. However, the original Ardupilot was not designed for applications in the field of swarm robotics. Hence, the main contribution of this paper is to endow Ardupilot with the capability to handle swarm robotics simulations, including the refactoring of the manufacturer's description files. This work offers a comprehensive and realisti…
There is a growing interest in Behavior Trees (BTs) as a tool to describe and implement robot behaviors. BTs were devised in the video game industry and their adoption in robotics resulted in the development of ad-hoc libraries to design and execute BTs that fit complex robotics software architectures. While there is broad consensus on how BTs work, some characteristics rely on the implementation choices done in the specific software library used. In this letter, we outline practical aspects in the adoption of BTs and the solutions devised by the robotics community to fully exploit the advanta…
To better optimise the global food supply chain, robotic solutions are needed to automate tasks currently completed by humans. Namely, phenotyping, quality analysis and harvesting are all open problems in the field of agricultural robotics. Robotic perception is a key challenge for autonomous solutions to such problems as scene understanding and object detection are vital prerequisites to any grasping tasks that a robot may undertake. This work conducts a brief review of modern robot perception models and discusses their efficacy within the agri-food domain.
National Institute of Technology, Raipur（印度国立理工学院赖布尔分校）；Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad（莫蒂拉尔·尼赫鲁国立理工学院阿拉哈巴德分校）；Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad（印度信息技术学院阿拉哈巴德分校）
Cloud Robotics is one of the emerging area of robotics. It has created a lot of attention due to its direct practical implications on Robotics. In Cloud Robotics, the concept of cloud computing is used to offload computational extensive jobs of the robots to the cloud. Apart from this, additional functionalities can also be offered on run to the robots on demand. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the computational intensive algorithm in robotics used by robots for navigation and map building in an unknown environment. Several Cloud based frameworks are proposed specificall…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；PerceptIn（普思英察）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Robotic computing has reached a tipping point, with a myriad of robots (e.g., drones, self-driving cars, logistic robots) being widely applied in diverse scenarios. The continuous proliferation of robotics, however, critically depends on efficient computing substrates, driven by real-time requirements, robotic size-weight-and-power constraints, cybersecurity considerations, and dynamically changing scenarios. Within all platforms, FPGA is able to deliver both software and hardware solutions with low power, high performance, reconfigurability, reliability, and adaptivity characteristics, servin…
Robotic Grasping has always been an active topic in robotics since grasping is one of the fundamental but most challenging skills of robots. It demands the coordination of robotic perception, planning, and control for robustness and intelligence. However, current solutions are still far behind humans, especially when confronting unstructured scenarios. In this paper, we survey the advances of robotic grasping, starting from the classical formulations and solutions to the modern ones. By reviewing the history of robotic grasping, we want to provide a complete view of this community, and perhaps…
UAS Technikum Wien（维也纳技术高等学院）；Ural Federal University（乌拉尔联邦大学）；Johannes Kepler University Linz（林茨约翰内斯开普勒大学）
In the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems and the delivery of goods, new technology approaches need to be developed in order to cope with certain challenges that last mile delivery entails, such as navigation in an urban environment. Autonomous delivery robots can help overcome these challenges. We propose a method for performing mixed reality (MR) simulation with ROS-based robots using Unity, which synchronizes the real and virtual environment, and simultaneously uses the sensor information of the real robots to locate themselves and project them into the virtual environment, so th…
School of Computing, DePaul Univeristy（德保罗大学计算机学院）
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a new type of snake robots made from compliant and structurally deformable modules. Leveraging the controllable large bending, these robots can naturally generate various snake locomotion gaits. Here, we investigate the swimming locomotion of soft robotic snakes. A numerically efficient dynamic model of the robot is first derived. Then, a distributed contact mo…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Validation of robotics theory on real-world hardware platforms is important to prove the practical feasibility of algorithms. This paper discusses some of the lessons learned while adapting the EvoBot, a low-cost robotics platform that we designed and prototyped, for research in diverse areas in robotics. The EvoBot platform was designed to be a low cost, open source, general purpose robotics platform intended to enable testing and validation of algorithms from a wide variety of sub-fields of robotics. Throughout the paper, we outline and discuss some common failures, practical limitations and…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
Inter-process communication (IPC) is one of the core functions of modern robotics middleware. We propose an efficient IPC technique called TZC (Towards Zero-Copy). As a core component of TZC, we design a novel algorithm called partial serialization. Our formulation can generate messages that can be divided into two parts. During message transmission, one part is transmitted through a socket and the other part uses shared memory. The part within shared memory is never copied or serialized during its lifetime. We have integrated TZC with ROS and ROS2 and find that TZC can be easily combined with…
University of California Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；University of California Riverside（加利福尼亚大学河滨分校）
OpenRoACH is a 15-cm 200-gram self-contained hexapedal robot with an onboard single-board computer. To our knowledge, it is the smallest legged robot with the capability of running the Robot Operating System (ROS) onboard. The robot is fully open sourced, uses accessible materials and off-the-shelf electronic components, can be fabricated with benchtop fast-prototyping machines such as a laser cutter and a 3D printer, and can be assembled by one person within two hours. Its sensory capacity has been tested with gyroscopes, accelerometers, Beacon sensors, color vision sensors, linescan sensors …
