Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems

Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained, and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability, reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server communication.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Science & Emerging Technologies (IJSET), Vol. 3, No. 2, February 201

Modelling and analyzing adaptive self-assembling strategies with Maude

Building adaptive systems with predictable emergent behavior is a challenging task and it is becoming a critical need. The research community has accepted the challenge by introducing approaches of various nature: from software architectures, to programming paradigms, to analysis techniques. We recently proposed a conceptual framework for adaptation centered around the role of control data. In this paper we show that it can be naturally realized in a reflective logical language like Maude by using the Reflective Russian Dolls model. Moreover, we exploit this model to specify, validate and analyse a prominent example of adaptive system: robot swarms equipped with self-assembly strategies. The analysis exploits the statistical model checker PVeStA

IMPLEMENTATION OF A LOCALIZATION-ORIENTED HRI FOR WALKING ROBOTS IN THE ROBOCUP ENVIRONMENT

This paper presents the design and implementation of a human–robot interface capable of evaluating robot localization performance and maintaining full control of robot behaviors in the RoboCup domain. The system consists of legged robots, behavior modules, an overhead visual tracking system, and a graphic user interface. A human–robot communication framework is designed for executing cooperative and competitive processing tasks between users and robots by using object oriented and modularized software architecture, operability, and functionality. Some experimental results are presented to show the performance of the proposed system based on simulated and real-time information. </jats:p

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

Performance evaluation of a distributed integrative architecture for robotics

The eld of robotics employs a vast amount of coupled sub-systems. These need to interact cooperatively and concurrently in order to yield the desired results. Some hybrid algorithms also require intensive cooperative interactions internally. The architecture proposed lends it- self amenable to problem domains that require rigorous calculations that are usually impeded by the capacity of a single machine, and incompatibility issues between software computing elements. Implementations are abstracted away from the physical hardware for ease of de- velopment and competition in simulation leagues. Monolithic developments are complex, and the desire for decoupled architectures arises. Decoupling also lowers the threshold for using distributed and parallel resources. The ability to re-use and re-combine components on de- mand, therefore is essential, while maintaining the necessary degree of interaction. For this reason we propose to build software components on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web Services. An additional bene t is platform independence regarding both the operating system and the implementation language. The robot soccer platform as well as the associated simulation leagues are the target domain for the development. Furthermore are machine vision and remote process control related portions of the architecture currently in development and testing for industrial environments. We provide numerical data based on the Python frameworks ZSI and SOAPpy undermining the suitability of this approach for the eld of robotics. Response times of signi cantly less than 50 ms even for fully interpreted, dynamic languages provides hard information showing the feasibility of Web Services based SOAs even in time critical robotic applications