Towards Declarative Safety Rules for Perception Specification Architectures

Agriculture has a high number of fatalities compared to other blue collar fields, additionally population decreasing in rural areas is resulting in decreased work force. These issues have resulted in increased focus on improving efficiency of and introducing autonomy in agriculture. Field robots are an increasingly promising branch of robotics targeted at full automation in agriculture. The safety aspect however is rely addressed in connection with safety standards, which limits the real-world applicability. In this paper we present an analysis of a vision pipeline in connection with functional-safety standards, in order to propose solutions for how to ascertain that the system operates as required. Based on the analysis we demonstrate a simple mechanism for verifying that a vision pipeline is functioning correctly, thus improving the safety in the overall system.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2015 (arXiv:1601.00877

Software Enginering Technique For Modularity Property In Component-Based Software Architecture

Robots are widely used in surgical rooms of the main hospitals. The most common surgical robot is the Intuitive "Da Vinci" but other new high-tech devices are spreading to help the surgeons in their medical tasks. Such kind of devices are useful to decrees the surgeons physical and psychological stress and increasing the overall safety. The surgical room is a complex environment with a lot of heterogeneous devices made by dierent producers. Currently the devices work independently but in order to increase the functionalities to give to the users is necessary to think how to connect all of them

Model-Driven Interaction Design for Social Robots

Robotic software development frameworks lack a possibility to present,validate and generate qualitative complex human robot interactions and robot de-velopers are mostly left with unclear informal project specifications. The devel-opment of a human-robot interaction is a complex task and involves different ex-perts, for example, the need for human-robot interaction (HRI) specialists, whoknow about the psychological impact of the robot’s movements during the in-teraction in order to design the best possible user experience. In this paper, wepresent a new project that aims to provide exactly this. Focusing on the interac-tion flow and movements of a robot for human-robot interactions we aim to pro-vide a set of modelling languages for human-robot interaction which serves as acommon, more formal, discussion point between the different stakeholders. Thisis a new project and the main topics of this publication are the scenario descrip-tion, the analysis of the different stakeholders, our experience as robot applicationdevelopers for our partner, as well as the future work we plan to achieve

Model-driven engineering for mobile robotic systems: a systematic mapping study

Mobile robots operate in various environments (e.g. aquatic, aerial, or terrestrial), they come in many diverse shapes and they are increasingly becoming parts of our lives. The successful engineering of mobile robotics systems demands the interdisciplinary collaboration of experts from different domains, such as mechanical and electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, and systems engineering. Research and industry have tried to tackle this heterogeneity by proposing a multitude of model-driven solutions to engineer the software of mobile robotics systems. However, there is no systematic study of the state of the art in model-driven engineering (MDE) for mobile robotics systems that could guide research or practitioners in finding model-driven solutions and tools to efficiently engineer mobile robotics systems. The paper is contributing to this direction by providing a map of software engineering research in MDE that investigates (1) which types of robots are supported by existing MDE approaches, (2) the types and characteristics of MRSs that are engineered using MDE approaches, (3) a description of how MDE approaches support the engineering of MRSs, (4) how existing MDE approaches are validated, and (5) how tools support existing MDE approaches. We also provide a replication package to assess, extend, and/or replicate the study. The results of this work and the highlighted challenges can guide researchers and practitioners from robotics and software engineering through the research landscape

Desarrollo de un sistema distribuido bajo la norma IEC-61499 para control de robot Kuka Modelo Youbot.

El presente trabajo investigativo tuvo como finalidad el empleo del estándar IEC-61499 para el desarrollo de un sistema de control distribuido para el control de un robot Kuka modelo YouBot. Este estándar consiste en una arquitectura de referencia para el desarrollo de aplicaciones de control con lógica descentralizada. Está basada en bloques funcionales (FBs) que se definen como la unidad estructural básica de los modelos, tiene un alto nivel de versatilidad para el diseño de sistemas, ya que permite combinar software independiente del hardware utilizado. Para modelar el sistema se utilizó el software 4DIAC-IDE y se crearon bloques funcionales (FBs) para el control de la plataforma omnidireccional, el brazo robótico y el gripper de agarre que en conjunto conforman el robot; posteriormente con la ayuda del programa PuTTy se implementó de manera remota el runtime FORTE el cual fue ejecutado en una PC que se encuentra a bordo del robot Kuka YouBot. Se evidenció en los resultados que la programación mediante FBs ha hecho que estos sean vistos como una herramienta efectiva para la automatización de sistemas flexibles y reconfigurables, obteniendo una efectividad del 98,89% de aciertos en las pruebas estipuladas. Se concluye que el estándar permite controlar el algoritmo mediante eventos, ya que tiene una conexión entre la ejecución del flujo de eventos y flujo de datos, de esta manera se puede establecer prioridades en el orden de ejecución de los bloques funcionales, con lo cual se probó el funcionamiento y las prestaciones que ofrecen este nuevo método de programación y las últimas versiones de software basadas en él disponibles actualmente.The present research work has as a purpose the use of the IEC-61499 standard for the development of a distributed control system for the control of a Kuka model Youbot robot. This standard consists of a reference architecture for the development of control applications with decentralized logic. It is based on functional blocks (FBs) that are defined as the basic structural unit of these models, they have a high level of versatility for the design of systems, since it allows to combine software independent of the hardware used. To model the system, the software was used 4DIAC-IDE and functional blocks (FBs) were created for the control of the omnidirectional platform, the robotic arm and the gripping gripper that together make up the robot, later with the help of the PuttY program the FORTE runtime was remotely implemented. Which was executed on a PC that is on board the robot Kuka YouBot. It was evidenced in the results that the programming by means of FBs has made that these are seen as an effective tool for the automation of flexible and reconfigurable systems, obtaining an effectiveness of 98.89% of correctness in the stipulated tests. It is concluded that the standard allows to control the algorithm through events, since it has a connection between the execution of the flow of events and data flow, in this way you can establish priorities in the order of execution of the functional blocks, which proved the operation and the features that offer This new programming method and the latest software versions based on the currently available

Desarrollo de un sistema distribuido bajo la norma IEC-61499 para control de robot Kuka Modelo Youbot.

El presente trabajo investigativo tuvo como finalidad el empleo del estándar IEC-61499 para el desarrollo de un sistema de control distribuido para el control de un robot Kuka modelo YouBot. Este estándar consiste en una arquitectura de referencia para el desarrollo de aplicaciones de control con lógica descentralizada. Está basada en bloques funcionales (FBs) que se definen como la unidad estructural básica de los modelos, tiene un alto nivel de versatilidad para el diseño de sistemas, ya que permite combinar software independiente del hardware utilizado. Para modelar el sistema se utilizó el software 4DIAC-IDE y se crearon bloques funcionales (FBs) para el control de la plataforma omnidireccional, el brazo robótico y el gripper de agarre que en conjunto conforman el robot; posteriormente con la ayuda del programa PuTTy se implementó de manera remota el runtime FORTE el cual fue ejecutado en una PC que se encuentra a bordo del robot Kuka YouBot. Se evidenció en los resultados que la programación mediante FBs ha hecho que estos sean vistos como una herramienta efectiva para la automatización de sistemas flexibles y reconfigurables, obteniendo una efectividad del 98,89% de aciertos en las pruebas estipuladas. Se concluye que el estándar permite controlar el algoritmo mediante eventos, ya que tiene una conexión entre la ejecución del flujo de eventos y flujo de datos, de esta manera se puede establecer prioridades en el orden de ejecución de los bloques funcionales, con lo cual se probó el funcionamiento y las prestaciones que ofrecen este nuevo método de programación y las últimas versiones de software basadas en él disponibles actualmente.The present research work has as a purpose the use of the IEC-61499 standard for the development of a distributed control system for the control of a Kuka model Youbot robot. This standard consists of a reference architecture for the development of control applications with decentralized logic. It is based on functional blocks (FBs) that are defined as the basic structural unit of these models, they have a high level of versatility for the design of systems, since it allows to combine software independent of the hardware used. To model the system, the software was used 4DIAC-IDE and functional blocks (FBs) were created for the control of the omnidirectional platform, the robotic arm and the gripping gripper that together make up the robot, later with the help of the PuttY program the FORTE runtime was remotely implemented. Which was executed on a PC that is on board the robot Kuka YouBot. It was evidenced in the results that the programming by means of FBs has made that these are seen as an effective tool for the automation of flexible and reconfigurable systems, obtaining an effectiveness of 98.89% of correctness in the stipulated tests. It is concluded that the standard allows to control the algorithm through events, since it has a connection between the execution of the flow of events and data flow, in this way you can establish priorities in the order of execution of the functional blocks, which proved the operation and the features that offer This new programming method and the latest software versions based on the currently available

A model-based approach to software deployment in robotics

Deploying a complex robot software architecture on real robot systems and getting it to run reliably is a challenging task. We argue that software deployment decisions should be separated as much as possible from the core development of software functionalities. This will make the developed software more independent of a particular hardware architecture (and thus more reusable) and allow it to be deployed more flexibly on a wider variety of robot platforms. This paper presents a domain-specific language (DSL) which supports this idea and demonstrates how the DSL is used in a model-driven engineering-based development process. A practical example of applying the DSL to the development of an application for the KUKA youBot platform is given