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 RealSense L515. Experiments showed that the SL Sensor surpasses the two devices in both precision and accuracy for indoor surface reconstruction applications. Furthermore, to demonstrate SL Sensor's ability to be a structured light sensing research platform for robotic applications, a motion compensation strategy was developed that allows the SL Sensor to operate during linear motion when traditional PSP methods only work when the sensor is static. Field experiments show that the SL Sensor is able to produce highly detailed reconstructions of spray plastered surfaces. The robot operating system (ROS)-based software and a sample hardware build of the SL Sensor are made open-source with the objective to make structured light sensing more accessible to the construction robotics community. All documentation and code is available at https://github.com/ethz-asl/sl_sensor/ .
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
ROSE: Rotation-based Squeezing Robotic Gripper toward Universal Handling of Objects
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST)（日本先进科学技术学院）；Japan Science and Technology Agency（日本科学技术振兴机构）；Hanoi University of Industry（河内工业大学）；Mitsubishi Electrics Corp.（三菱电机公司）
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…
Technological Federal University of Paraná - UTFPR（巴拉那州立理工大学）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；Federal University of Pará（帕拉联邦大学）
Robots are becoming more and more commonplace in many industry settings. This successful adoption can be partly attributed to (1) their increasingly affordable cost and (2) the possibility of developing intelligent, software-driven robots. Unfortunately, robotics software consumes significant amounts of energy. Moreover, robots are often battery-driven, meaning that even a small energy improvement can help reduce its energy footprint and increase its autonomy and user experience. In this paper, we study the Robot Operating System (ROS) ecosystem, the de-facto standard for developing and protot…
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…
Technical University of Munich, Germany（慕尼黑技术大学）；School of Engineering & Design, Department of Mobility Systems Engineering, Institute of Automotive Technology（工程与设计学院，移动系统工程系，汽车技术研究所）；School of Engineering & Design, Department of Engineering Physics and Computation, Institute of Automatic Control（工程与设计学院，工程物理与计算系，自动控制研究所）
We propose a novel framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in modular robotics to train a robot directly from joint states, using traditional robotic tools. We use an state-of-the-art implementation of the Proximal Policy Optimization, Trust Region Policy Optimization and Actor-Critic Kronecker-Factored Trust Region algorithms to learn policies in four different Modular Articulated Robotic Arm (MARA) environments. We support this process using a framework that communicates with typical tools used in robotics, such as Gazebo and Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2). We evaluate several algo…
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…
Because robots can directly perceive and affect the physical world, security issues take on particular importance. In this paper, we describe the results of our work on scanning the entire IPv4 address space of the Internet for instances of the Robot Operating System (ROS), a widely used robotics platform for research. Our results identified that a number of hosts supporting ROS are exposed to the public Internet, thereby allowing anyone to access robotic sensors and actuators. As a proof of concept, and with consent, we were able to read image sensor information and move the robot of a resear…
Distributed robotic systems rely heavily on the publish-subscribe communication paradigm and middleware frameworks that support it, such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), to efficiently implement modular computation graphs. The ROS 2 executor, a high-level task scheduler which handles ROS 2 messages, is a performance bottleneck. We extend ros2_tracing, a framework with instrumentation and tools for real-time tracing of ROS 2, with the analysis and visualization of the flow of messages across distributed ROS 2 systems. Our method detects one-to-many and many-to-many causal links between inpu…
ROS-related Robotic Systems Development with V-model-based Application of MeROS Metamodel
Warsaw University of Technology, Institute of Control（华沙技术大学控制学院）；Warsaw University of Technology, Institute of Computer Science（华沙技术大学计算机科学学院）；Industrial Research Institute for Automation（自动化与测量工业研究院）；Ukrainian Catholic University, Applied Science Faculty（乌克兰天主教大学应用科学学院）
This paper presents a practical approach towards implementing pathfinding algorithms on real-world and low-cost non- commercial hardware platforms. While using robotics simulation platforms as a test-bed for our algorithms we easily overlook real- world exogenous problems that are developed by external factors. Such problems involve robot wheel slips, asynchronous motors, abnormal sensory data or unstable power sources. The real-world dynamics tend to be very painful even for executing simple algorithms like a Wavefront planner or A-star search. This paper addresses designing techniques that t…
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…
Runtime Verification and Field-based Testing for ROS-based Robotic Systems
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI)（格兰萨索科学研究所）；University of Brasilia（巴西利亚大学）；Ruhr University Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）；University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）
Samsung Research America（三星美国研究院）；Open Robotics（开放机器人组织）
The next chapter of the robotics revolution is well underway with the deployment of robots for a broad range of commercial use-cases. Even in a myriad of applications and environments, there exists a common vocabulary of components that robots share - the need for a modular, scalable, and reliable architecture; sensing; planning; mobility; and autonomy. The Robot Operating System (ROS) was an integral part of the last chapter, demonstrably expediting robotics research with freely-available components and a modular framework. However, ROS 1 was not designed with many necessary production-grade …
RobotPerf: An Open-Source, Vendor-Agnostic, Benchmarking Suite for Evaluating Robotics Computing System Performance
Acceleration Robotics（加速机器人公司）；Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt（阿尔卑斯-亚得里亚大学克拉根福分校）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Johannes Kepler University Linz（约翰·开普勒林茨大学）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）；AMD（AMD公司）；Intel（英特尔公司）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Barnard College, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学巴纳德学院）
We introduce ROS-X-Habitat, a software interface that bridges the AI Habitat platform for embodied learning-based agents with other robotics resources via ROS. This interface not only offers standardized communication protocols between embodied agents and simulators, but also enables physically and photorealistic simulation that benefits the training and/or testing of vision-based embodied agents. With this interface, roboticists can evaluate their own Habitat RL agents in another ROS-based simulator or use Habitat Sim v2 as the test bed for their own robotic algorithms. Through in silico expe…
Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6), Theoretical Neuroscience（高等模拟研究所（IAS-6），理论神经科学）；Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6), Computational and Systems Neuroscience（神经科学与医学研究所（INM-6），计算与系统神经科学）；JARA BRAIN Institute I（JARA BRAIN 研究所 I）；Jülich Research Center（于利希研究中心）；JARA Jülich（JARA 于利希）；PDC Center for High Performance Computing KTH Stockholm（KTH 斯德哥尔摩高性能计算中心）；Faculty of Biology Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg（弗赖堡阿尔伯特-路德维希大学生物学院）；Bernstein Center Freiburg Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg（弗赖堡阿尔伯特-路德维希大学伯恩斯坦中心）
In order to properly assess the function and computational properties of simulated neural systems, it is necessary to account for the nature of the stimuli that drive the system. However, providing stimuli that are rich and yet both reproducible and amenable to experimental manipulations is technically challenging, and even more so if a closed-loop scenario is required. In this work, we present a novel approach to solve this problem, connecting robotics and neural network simulators. We implement a middleware solution that bridges the Robotic Operating System (ROS) to the Multi-Simulator Coord…
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；HomeAway, Inc.（HomeAway公司）；Indiana University - Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校）
We investigate the scenario that a robot needs to reach a designated goal after taking a sequence of appropriate actions in a non-static environment that is partially structured. One application example is to control a marine vehicle to move in the ocean. The ocean environment is dynamic and oftentimes the ocean waves result in strong disturbances that can disturb the vehicle's motion. Modeling such dynamic environment is non-trivial, and integrating such model in the robotic motion control is particularly difficult. Fortunately, the ocean currents usually form some local patterns (e.g. vortex…
