Robotics Middleware: A Comprehensive Literature Survey and Attribute-Based Bibliography

Autonomous robots are complex systems that require the interaction between numerous heterogeneous components (software and hardware). Because of the increase in complexity of robotic applications and the diverse range of hardware, robotic middleware is designed to manage the complexity and heterogeneity of the hardware and applications, promote the integration of new technologies, simplify software design, hide the complexity of low-level communication and the sensor heterogeneity of the sensors, improve software quality, reuse robotic software infrastructure across multiple research efforts, and to reduce production costs. This paper presents a literature survey and attribute-based bibliography of the current state of the art in robotic middleware design. The main aim of the survey is to assist robotic middleware researchers in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches and their appropriateness for their applications. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive set of appropriate bibliographic references that are classified based on middleware attributes.http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/95901

Onboard Mission- and Contingency Management based on Behavior Trees for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant attention for their potential in various sectors, including surveillance, logistics, and disaster management. This thesis focuses on developing a novel onboard mission and contingency management system based on Behavior Trees for UAVs. The study aims to assert if behavior trees can be effectively applied to this domain and how they perform with respect to other modelling architectures. Furthermore, this document explores which tree structures are more efficient, good-design practices and behavior tree limitations. Overall, this thesis addresses the challenge of autonomous onboard decision-making of UAVs in complex and dynamic environments, particularly in the context of delivery missions in off-shore wind farms. The developed architecture is tested in a simulated environment. The research integrates a Skill Manager, a Mission Planner, and a Mission and Contingency Manager. The architecture leverages Behavior Trees to facilitate both mission execution and contingency management. The thesis also presents a quantitative analysis of key performance indicators, providing a comparative evaluation against traditional architectures like Finite State Machines. The results indicate that the proposed system is efficient in mission execution and effective in handling contingencies. This study offers a comprehensive structure targeting onboard planning, contingency management and concurrent actions execution. It also presents a quantitative analysis of Behavior Trees' performance in UAV mission execution and reactivity to contingent situations. It contributes to the ongoing discourse on UAV autonomy, offering insights beneficial for the broader deployment of UAVs in various industrial applications

Evolution of the robotic control frameworks at INRIA Rhône-Alpes

Demos - http://car2011.inrialpes.fr/presentations-and-papers/National audienceIntense efforts have been carried out in the last decades to de ne and implement frameworks to ease the development of robotic applications. This led each research group to propose their own solution, well suited for their needs, however no common framework has been adopted. But today we have the feeling that a peculiar framework has some of the qualities required to meet with general acceptance as far robotics research is concerned : the open source robotics platform ROS developed by Willow Garage. At INRIA Rhône-Alpes, we are such a research group that developed its own framework, Hugr. In this paper, we present the requirements that ruled its design and how we now envision migrating to ROS

Robotix-Academy Conference for Industrial Robotics (RACIR) 2019

Robotix-Academy Conference for Industrial Robotics (RACIR) is held in University of Liège, Belgium, during June 05, 2019. The topics concerned by RACIR are: robot design, robot kinematics/dynamics/control, system integration, sensor/ actuator networks, distributed and cloud robotics, bio-inspired systems, service robots, robotics in automation, biomedical applications, autonomous vehicles (land, sea and air), robot perception, manipulation with multi-finger hands, micro/nano systems, sensor information, robot vision, multimodal interface and human-robot interaction.

Axon: A Middleware for Robotics

The area of multi-robot systems and frameworks has become, in recent years, a hot research area in the field of robotics. This is attributed to the great advances made in robotic hardware, software, and the diversity of robotic systems. The need to integrate different heterogeneous robotic components and systems has led to the birth of robotic middleware. A robotic middleware is an intricate piece of software that masks the heterogeneity of underlying components and provides high-level interfaces that enable developers to make efficient use of the components. A large number of robotic middleware programs exist today. Each one comes with its own design methodologies and complexities. Up to this moment, however, there exists no unified standard for robotic middleware. Moreover, many of the middleware in use today deal with low-level and hardware aspects. This adds unnecessary complexity in research involving robotic behavior, inter-robot collaboration, and other high-level experiments which do not require prior knowledge of low-level details. In addition, the notion of structured lightweight data transfer between robots is not emphasized in existing work. This dissertation tackles the robotic middleware problem from a different perspective. The aim of this work is to develop a robust middleware that is able to handle multiple robots and clients within a laboratory environment. In the proposed middleware, a high-level representation of robots in an environment is introduced. Also, this work introduces the notion of structured and efficient data exchange as an important issue in robotic middleware research. The middleware has been designed and developed using rigorous methodologies and leading edge technologies. Moreover, the middleware’s ability to integrate different types of robots in a seamless manner, as well as its ability to accommodate multiple robots and clients, has been tested and evaluated

A generic architecture style for self-adaptive cyber-physical systems

Die aktuellen Konzepte zur Gestaltung von Regelungssystemen basieren auf dynamischen Verhaltensmodellen, die mathematische Ansätze wie Differentialgleichungen zur Ableitung der entsprechenden Funktionen verwenden. Diese Konzepte stoßen jedoch aufgrund der zunehmenden Systemkomplexität allmählich an ihre Grenzen. Zusammen mit der Entwicklung dieser Konzepte entsteht eine Architekturevolution der Regelungssysteme. In dieser Dissertation wird eine Taxonomie definiert, um die genannte Architekturevolution anhand eines typischen Beispiels, der adaptiven Geschwindigkeitsregelung (ACC), zu veranschaulichen. Aktuelle ACC-Varianten, die auf der Regelungstheorie basieren, werden in Bezug auf ihre Architekturen analysiert. Die Analyseergebnisse zeigen, dass das zukünftige Regelungssystem im ACC eine umfangreichere Selbstadaptationsfähigkeit und Skalierbarkeit erfordert. Dafür sind kompliziertere Algorithmen mit unterschiedlichen Berechnungsmechanismen erforderlich. Somit wird die Systemkomplexität erhöht und führt dazu, dass das zukünftige Regelungssystem zu einem selbstadaptiven cyber-physischen System wird und signifikante Herausforderungen für die Architekturgestaltung des Systems darstellt. Inspiriert durch Ansätze des Software-Engineering zur Gestaltung von Architekturen von softwareintensiven Systemen wird in dieser Dissertation ein generischer Architekturstil entwickelt. Der entwickelte Architekturstil dient als Vorlage, um vernetzte Architekturen mit Verfolgung der entwickelten Designprinzipien nicht nur für die aktuellen Regelungssysteme, sondern auch für selbstadaptiven cyber-physischen Systeme in der Zukunft zu konstruieren. Unterschiedliche Auslösemechanismen und Kommunikationsparadigmen zur Gestaltung der dynamischen Verhalten von Komponenten sind in der vernetzten Architektur anwendbar. Zur Bewertung der Realisierbarkeit des Architekturstils werden aktuelle ACCs erneut aufgenommen, um entsprechende logische Architekturen abzuleiten und die Architekturkonsistenz im Vergleich zu den originalen Architekturen basierend auf der Regelungstheorie (z. B. in Form von Blockdiagrammen) zu untersuchen. Durch die Anwendung des entwickelten generischen Architekturstils wird in dieser Dissertation eine künstliche kognitive Geschwindigkeitsregelung (ACCC) als zukünftige ACC-Variante entworfen, implementiert und evaluiert. Die Evaluationsergebnisse zeigen signifikante Leistungsverbesserungen des ACCC im Vergleich zum menschlichen Fahrer und aktuellen ACC-Varianten.Current concepts of designing automatic control systems rely on dynamic behavioral modeling by using mathematical approaches like differential equations to derive corresponding functions, and slowly reach limitations due to increasing system complexity. Along with the development of these concepts, an architectural evolution of automatic control systems is raised. This dissertation defines a taxonomy to illustrate the aforementioned architectural evolution relying on a typical example of control application: adaptive cruise control (ACC). Current ACC variants, with their architectures considering control theory, are analyzed. The analysis results indicate that the future automatic control system in ACC requires more substantial self-adaptation capability and scalability. For this purpose, more complicated algorithms requiring different computation mechanisms must be integrated into the system and further increase system complexity. This makes the future automatic control system evolve into a self-adaptive cyber-physical system and consistitutes significant challenges for the system’s architecture design. Inspired by software engineering approaches for designing architectures of software-intensive systems, a generic architecture style is proposed. The proposed architecture style serves as a template by following the developed design principle to construct networked architectures not only for the current automatic control systems but also for self-adaptive cyber-physical systems in the future. Different triggering mechanisms and communication paradigms for designing dynamic behaviors are applicable in the networked architecture. To evaluate feasibility of the architecture style, current ACCs are retaken to derive corresponding logical architectures and examine architectural consistency compared to the previous architectures considering the control theory (e.g., in the form of block diagrams). By applying the proposed generic architecture style, an artificial cognitive cruise control (ACCC) is designed, implemented, and evaluated as a future ACC in this dissertation. The evaluation results show significant performance improvements in the ACCC compared to the human driver and current ACC variants

Model for WCET prediction, scheduling and task allocation for emergent agent-behaviours in real-time scenarios

[ES]Hasta el momento no se conocen modelos de tiempo real específicamente desarrollados para su uso en sistemas abiertos, como las Organizaciones Virtuales de Agentes (OVs). Convencionalmente, los modelos de tiempo real se aplican a sistemas cerrados donde todas las variables se conocen a priori. Esta tesis presenta nuevas contribuciones y la novedosa integración de agentes en tiempo real dentro de OVs. Hasta donde alcanza nuestro conocimiento, éste es el primer modelo específicamente diseñado para su aplicación en OVs con restricciones temporales estrictas. Esta tesis proporciona una nueva perspectiva que combina la apertura y dinamicidad necesarias en una OV con las restricciones de tiempo real. Ésto es una aspecto complicado ya que el primer paradigma no es estricto, como el propio término de sistema abierto indica, sin embargo, el segundo paradigma debe cumplir estrictas restricciones. En resumen, el modelo que se presenta permite definir las acciones que una OV debe llevar a cabo con un plazo concreto, considerando los cambios que pueden ocurrir durante la ejecución de un plan particular. Es una planificación de tiempo real en una OV. Otra de las principales contribuciones de esta tesis es un modelo para el cálculo del tiempo de ejecución en el peor caso (WCET). La propuesta es un modelo efectivo para calcular el peor escenario cuando un agente desea formar parte de una OV y para ello, debe incluir sus tareas o comportamientos dentro del sistema de tiempo real, es decir, se calcula el WCET de comportamientos emergentes en tiempo de ejecución. También se incluye una planificación local para cada nodo de ejecución basada en el algoritmo FPS y una distribución de tareas entre los nodos disponibles en el sistema. Para ambos modelos se usan modelos matemáticos y estadísticos avanzados para crear un mecanismo adaptable, robusto y eficiente para agentes inteligentes en OVs. El desconocimiento, pese al estudio realizado, de una plataforma para sistemas abiertos que soporte agentes con restricciones de tiempo real y los mecanismos necesarios para el control y la gestión de OVs, es la principal motivación para el desarrollo de la plataforma de agentes PANGEA+RT. PANGEA+RT es una innovadora plataforma multi-agente que proporciona soporte para la ejecución de agentes en ambientes de tiempo real. Finalmente, se presenta un caso de estudio donde robots heterogéneos colaboran para realizar tareas de vigilancia. El caso de estudio se ha desarrollado con la plataforma PANGEA+RT donde el modelo propuesto está integrado. Por tanto al final de la tesis, con este caso de estudio se obtienen los resultados y conclusiones que validan el modelo