A plug and play transparent communication layer for cloud robotics architectures

The cloud robotics paradigm aims at enhancing the abilities of robots by using cloud services, but it still poses several challenges in the research community. Most of the current literature focuses on how to enrich specific robotic capabilities, overlooking how to effectively establish communication between the two fields. Our work proposes a “plug-and-play” solution to bridge the communication gap between cloud and robotic applications. The proposed solution is designed based on the mature WebSocket technology and it can be extended to any ROS-based robotic platform. The main contributions of this work are the definition of a reliable autoconnection/autoconfiguration mechanism as well as to outline a scalable communication layer that allows the effective control of multiple robots from multiple users. The “plug-and-play” solution was evaluated in both simulated and real scenarios. In the first case, the presence of users and robots was simulated with Robot Operating System (ROS) nodes running on five machines. In the real scenario, three non-expert users teleoperated, simultaneously, three remote robots by using the proposed communication layer with different networking protocols. Results confirmed the reliability at different levels: at startup (success_rate = 100%); during high-rate communications (message_lost = 0%); in performing open-loop spiral trajectories with enhancement, with respect to similar works; and in the quality of simultaneous teleoperations

Middleware platform for distributed applications incorporating robots, sensors and the cloud

Cyber-physical systems in the factory of the future will consist of cloud-hosted software governing an agile production process executed by autonomous mobile robots and controlled by analyzing the data from a vast number of sensors. CPSs thus operate on a distributed production floor infrastructure and the set-up continuously changes with each new manufacturing task. In this paper, we present our OSGibased middleware that abstracts the deployment of servicebased CPS software components on the underlying distributed platform comprising robots, actuators, sensors and the cloud. Moreover, our middleware provides specific support to develop components based on artificial neural networks, a technique that recently became very popular for sensor data analytics and robot actuation. We demonstrate a system where a robot takes actions based on the input from sensors in its vicinity

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

An elastic software architecture for extreme-scale big data analytics

This chapter describes a software architecture for processing big-data analytics considering the complete compute continuum, from the edge to the cloud. The new generation of smart systems requires processing a vast amount of diverse information from distributed data sources. The software architecture presented in this chapter addresses two main challenges. On the one hand, a new elasticity concept enables smart systems to satisfy the performance requirements of extreme-scale analytics workloads. By extending the elasticity concept (known at cloud side) across the compute continuum in a fog computing environment, combined with the usage of advanced heterogeneous hardware architectures at the edge side, the capabilities of the extreme-scale analytics can significantly increase, integrating both responsive data-in-motion and latent data-at-rest analytics into a single solution. On the other hand, the software architecture also focuses on the fulfilment of the non-functional properties inherited from smart systems, such as real-time, energy-efficiency, communication quality and security, that are of paramount importance for many application domains such as smart cities, smart mobility and smart manufacturing.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under the ELASTIC Project (www.elastic-project.eu), grant agreement No 825473.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Phenolic profiling, biological activities and in silico studies of Acacia tortilis (Forssk.) Hayne ssp. raddiana extracts

The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020). L. Barros and R. C. Calhelha thank the national funding by the FCT, P.I., through the institutional scientific employment program-contract for their contracts. M. Carocho also thanks the project ValorNatural for his research contract. The authors are also grateful to the FEDER-Interreg España- Portugal programme for financial support through the project 0377_Iberphenol_6_E.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Engineering of next generation cyber-physical automation system architectures

Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) enable flexible and reconfigurable realization of automation system architectures, utilizing distributed control architectures with non-hierarchical modules linked together through different communication systems. Several control system architectures have been developed and validated in the past years by research groups. However, there is still a lack of implementation in industry. The intention of this work is to provide a summary of current alternative control system architectures that could be applied in industrial automation domain as well as a review of their commonalities. The aim is to point out the differences between the traditional centralized and hierarchical architectures to discussed ones, which rely on decentralized decision-making and control. Challenges and impacts that industries and engineers face in the process of adopting decentralized control architectures are discussed, analysing the obstacles for industrial acceptance and the new necessary interdisciplinary engineering skills. Finally, an outlook of possible mitigation and migration actions required to implement the decentralized control architectures is addressed.The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the support, and the partners of the EU Horizon 2020 project PERFoRM (2016b) for the fruitful discussions. The PERFoRM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680435.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Industrial agents in the era of service-oriented architectures and cloudbased industrial infrastructures

The umbrella paradigm underpinning novel collaborative industrial systems is to consider the set of intelligent system units as a conglomerate of distributed, autonomous, intelligent, proactive, fault-tolerant, and reusable units, which operate as a set of cooperating entities (Colombo and Karnouskos, 2009). These entities are forming an evolvable infrastructure, entering and/or going out (plug-in/plugout) in an asynchronous manner. Moreover, these entities, having each of them their own functionalities, data, and associated information are now connected and able to interact. They are capable of working in a proactive manner, initiating collaborative actions and dynamically interacting with each other in order to achieve both local and global objectives.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

ROS-based Solution for Robotic Services in Cloud Computing

Robot Operating System (ROS) is becoming a widely-used environment for devel- oping robot software systems. It provides unique features such as message-passing between processes and code reuse between robots. The new trend in ROS-based robotic systems is facing the development and delivery of effective services by com- bining the advantages of both cloud robotics and web services. Cloud robotics is the way that allows robots to overcome their limitations of pro- cessing and knowledge by boosting computational and cognitive capabilities. On the other hand, as an implementation of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), web Services allow mainly different ROS codes to be discovered over the internet for their reuse. However, the characterization, description, and discovery of the ROS service capability for the offered robotic functionality are still issues that are not fully ad- dressed. In this context, we focus in this thesis on developing an architecture for roboti software provisioning to both software developers and robots by exploiting the op- portunities of ROS, web services, and cloud robotics. We propose a complete SOA approach for cloud robotics, in which ROS-based robotic tasks are defined as web services. The approach focuses on defining the service cycle process of describing, discovering, and selecting services. Two characterizations for ROS web services are proposed. The service characterizations describe the semantic representation of the robot task from ROS itself. In each case, we present a strategy that allows users todiscover the relevant robotic service that can match their queries and robots