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 simulators and cloud simulations are enabling, e.g., large-scale reinforcement learning or distributed federated learning solutions. This has also enabled deeper integration of continuous interaction and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for robotic systems development, going beyond standard software unit tests with simulated tests to build and validate code automatically. We discuss the current technology readiness and list the potential new application scenarios that are becoming available. Finally, we discuss the current challenges in distributed robotic systems and list open research questions in the field.
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…
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 …
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…
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…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）
We present an implementation of SOTER, a run-time assurance framework for building safe distributed mobile robotic (DMR) systems, on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The safety of DMR systems cannot always be guaranteed at design time, especially when complex, off-the-shelf components are used that cannot be verified easily. SOTER addresses this by providing a language-based approach for run-time assurance for DMR systems. SOTER implements the reactive robotic software using the language P, a domain-specific language designed for implementing asynchronous event-driven systems, along wi…
Robots have inherently limited onboard processing, storage, and power capabilities. Cloud computing resources have the potential to provide significant advantages for robots in many applications. However, to make use of these resources, frameworks must be developed that facilitate robot interactions with cloud services. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based architecture called Smart Cloud that intends to overcome the physical limitations of single- or multi-robot systems through massively parallel computation, provided on demand by cloud services. Smart Cloud is implemented on Amazon Web Ser…
Towards LLM-Assisted Architecture Recovery for Real-World ROS~2 Systems: An Agent-Based Multi-Level Approach to Hierarchical Structural Architecture Reconstruction
Institute for Software and Systems Engineering, Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld 38678, Germany（软件与系统工程研究所， Clausthal 技术大学， Clausthal-Zellerfeld 38678，德国）
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 …
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…
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）；Instituto Tecnológico Vale（淡水河谷技术研究所）
The current state of electronic component miniaturization coupled with the increasing efficiency in hardware and software allow the development of smaller and compact robotic systems. The convenience of using these small, simple, yet capable robots has gathered the research community's attention towards practical applications of swarm robotics. This paper presents the design of a novel platform for swarm robotics applications that is low cost, easy to assemble using off-the-shelf components, and deeply integrated with the most used robotic framework available today: ROS (Robot Operating System…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Aerial Manipulation: Contact, Medium Coupling, and the Geometry of Readiness
Robotics and Mechatronics lab, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science, University of Twente（特温特大学电气工程、数学与计算机科学学院机器人与机电一体化实验室）；Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学计算机、控制与管理工程系）
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…
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）
Brain-Computer Interface meets ROS: A robotic approach to mentally drive telepresence robots
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）
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）
