Reusable generic software robot

Abstract. The main purpose of this thesis was to create a generic reusable software robot which can be deployed into any IaaS type of a cloud service. In this thesis the first thing to be researched was how to implement a virtualised environment into a cloud service. The possibilities for virtualising the environment were a container and a virtual machine. The two possible implementations were researched since the resulting implementation must be compatible with a cloud service. Firstly, it was found that a container-based implementation would be the best option because it is lightweight to move around and secondly, a start-up time of a new instance in a cloud service is fast. Possible cloud providers were scanned after researching possible implementation methods. Two possible cloud providers, AWS and Azure, were studied more closely since they offer an infrastructure as a service and once they are commonly used. AWS was chosen to be the platform to be used because of a higher maturity level and also because of the possibility to add or remove container capabilities. Finally, it was discussed how a generic reusable software robot was implemented. Notable circumstances of suitable tasks for a software robot were considered.Kertakäyttöinen geneerinen ohjelmistorobotti. Tiivistelmä. Tässä työssä tutkittiin, kuinka geneerinen kertakäyttöinen ohjelmistorobotti voidaan toteuttaa pilvipalvelussa. Ensin tarkasteltiin erilaisia virtualisointimenetelmiä, joilla ohjelmistorobotti voitaisiin toteuttaa. Tutkitut menetelmät olivat virtuaalikone ja kontti. Näitä kahta toteutustapaa vertailtiin huomioiden valmiin toteutuksen sopivuus pilvipalveluun. Kontti todettiin sopivimmaksi toteutustavaksi, koska se vie vähän tilaa ja uuden instanssin käynnistäminen on nopeaa. Pilvipalvelutarjoajia tutkittiin, kun sopiva toteutusmenetelmä ohjelmistorobotille oli löydetty. Tutkimuksessa keskityttiin AWS:ään ja Azureen, jotka ovat tällä hetkellä suurimpia markkinoilla toimivia infrastructure as a service -tyyppisten pilvipalveuiden tarjoajia. AWS valittiin toteutusalustaksi, koska se on teknisesti edistyneempi kuin Azure ja AWS:ssä on mahdollista lisätä ja poistaa kontin oikeuksia. Lopuksi esiteltiin, kuinka geneerinen kertakäyttöinen ohjelmistorobotti toteutettiin ja mitä täytyy ottaa huomioon, kun päätetään sopivasta käyttökohteesta ohjelmistorobotille

X-CAR: An Experimental Vehicle Platform for Connected Autonomy Research Powered by CARMA

Autonomous vehicles promise a future with a safer, cleaner, more efficient, and more reliable transportation system. However, the current approach to autonomy has focused on building small, disparate intelligences that are closed off to the rest of the world. Vehicle connectivity has been proposed as a solution, relying on a vision of the future where a mix of connected autonomous and human-driven vehicles populate the road. Developed by the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration as a reusable, extensible platform for controlling connected autonomous vehicles, the CARMA Platform is one of the technologies enabling this connected future. Nevertheless, the adoption of the CARMA Platform has been slow, with a contributing factor being the limited, expensive, and somewhat old vehicle configurations that are officially supported. To alleviate this problem, we propose X-CAR (eXperimental vehicle platform for Connected Autonomy Research). By implementing the CARMA Platform on more affordable, high quality hardware, X-CAR aims to increase the versatility of the CARMA Platform and facilitate its adoption for research and development of connected driving automation

Towards a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud through Operable Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines

In last decade, the paradigm of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has integrated industrial manufacturing systems with Cloud Computing technologies for Cloud Manufacturing. Up to 2015, there were many CPS-based manufacturing systems that collected real-time machining data to perform remote monitoring, prognostics and health management, and predictive maintenance. However, these CPS-integrated and network ready machines were not directly connected to the elements of Cloud Manufacturing and required human-in-the-loop. Addressing this gap, we introduced a new paradigm of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) that bridges a gap between physical machines and virtual space in 2017. CPMC virtualizes machine tools in cloud through web services for direct monitoring and operations through Internet. Fundamentally, CPMC differs with contemporary modern manufacturing paradigms. For instance, CPMC virtualizes machining tools in cloud using remote services and establish direct Internet-based communication, which is overlooked in existing Cloud Manufacturing systems. Another contemporary, namely cyber-physical production systems enable networked access to machining tools. Nevertheless, CPMC virtualizes manufacturing resources in cloud and monitor and operate them over the Internet. This dissertation defines the fundamental concepts of CPMC and expands its horizon in different aspects of cloud-based virtual manufacturing such as Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines. Digital Twin (DT) is another evolving concept since 2002 that creates as-is replicas of machining tools in cyber space. Up to 2018, many researchers proposed state-of-the-art DTs, which only focused on monitoring production lifecycle management through simulations and data driven analytics. But they overlooked executing manufacturing processes through DTs from virtual space. This dissertation identifies that DTs can be made more productive if they engage directly in direct execution of manufacturing operations besides monitoring. Towards this novel approach, this dissertation proposes a new operable DT model of CPMC that inherits the features of direct monitoring and operations from cloud. This research envisages and opens the door for future manufacturing systems where resources are developed as cloud-based DTs for remote and distributed manufacturing. Proposed concepts and visions of DTs have spawned the following fundamental researches. This dissertation proposes a novel concept of DT based Virtual Production Lines (VPL) in CPMC in 2019. It presents a design of a service-oriented architecture of DTs that virtualizes physical manufacturing resources in CPMC. Proposed DT architecture offers a more compact and integral service-oriented virtual representations of manufacturing resources. To re-configure a VPL, one requirement is to establish DT-to-DT collaborations in manufacturing clouds, which replicates to concurrent resource-to-resource collaborations in shop floors. Satisfying the above requirements, this research designs a novel framework to easily re-configure, monitor and operate VPLs using DTs of CPMC. CPMC publishes individual web services for machining tools, which is a traditional approach in the domain of service computing. But this approach overcrowds service registry databases. This dissertation introduces a novel fundamental service publication and discovery approach in 2020, OpenDT, which publishes DTs with collections of services. Experimental results show easier discovery and remote access of DTs while re-configuring VPLs. Proposed researches in this dissertation have received numerous citations both from industry and academia, clearly proving impacts of research contributions

Järjestelmätason testaus mikropalveluarkkitehtuurin kanssa

Microservice architecture is a software architecture style that has gained popularity in the last decade. Microservice architecture applications consist of multiple smaller microservices, which can be developed, tested and deployed independently. Testing the whole microservice application at system-level has been difficult for various reasons, such as that the services might use different technologies or the amount of services makes the system complex. The goal of this thesis is to study typical challenges in microservice testing and address them by developing a prototype of a tool for system-level testing of microservice applications. This thesis presents a prototype of a tool for microservice testing that focuses on making the test code and configuration reusable. Reusability allows creating new tests easily, because it is common for tests to share many parts. The tool uses Docker for running the microservices, which makes it agnostic to the technologies used by the services as long as they can be containerized. The tool is then used to test a real microservice application to validate that it is usable in practice. It is shown that the tool mostly fulfills its requirements and that it provides a good base for further development and studies

Common Data Fusion Framework : An open-source Common Data Fusion Framework for space robotics

Multisensor data fusion plays a vital role in providing autonomous systems with environmental information crucial for reliable functioning. In this article, we summarize the modular structure of the newly developed and released Common Data Fusion Framework and explain how it is used. Sensor data are registered and fused within the Common Data Fusion Framework to produce comprehensive 3D environment representations and pose estimations. The proposed software components to model this process in a reusable manner are presented through a complete overview of the framework, then the provided data fusion algorithms are listed, and through the case of 3D reconstruction from 2D images, the Common Data Fusion Framework approach is exemplified. The Common Data Fusion Framework has been deployed and tested in various scenarios that include robots performing operations of planetary rover exploration and tracking of orbiting satellites

MROS: Runtime Adaptation For Robot Control Architectures

Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with contingencies arising from dynamic environments-otherwise, these affect the reliability and quality of the mission execution. Existing proposals on how to build self-adaptive systems in robotics usually require a major re-design of the control architecture and rely on complex tools unfamiliar to the robotics community. Moreover, they are hard to reuse across applications. This paper presents MROS: a model-based framework for run-time adaptation of robot control architectures based on ROS. MROS uses a combination of domain-specific languages to model architectural variants and captures mission quality concerns, and an ontology-based implementation of the MAPE-K and meta-control visions for run-time adaptation. The experiment results obtained applying MROS in two realistic ROS-based robotic demonstrators show the benefits of our approach in terms of the quality of the mission execution, and MROS' extensibility and re-usability across robotic applications

Software Project Services using Infrastructure-as-Code

Infrastructure-as-code is a modern practice for IT automation as well as managing complex and large-scale infrastructure. It allows describing infrastructure and configuration in a code-like syntax easily understandable for any software developer. Unlike manual infrastructure configurations the infrastructure code can be versioned, tested, reviewed, and even compiled resulting in the actual desired systems infrastructure and configuration. The objective of this thesis is to create a new software project establishment process for a medium sized software company. The aim is to automate and streamline a beginning phase of new projects by creating and documenting a process of establishing basic software project services by using infrastructure-as-code. A desired feature of the new process is to partly delegate the work of IT department to project teams who are most aware of the tools and services required for each project. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part presents relevant infrastructure-as-code and DevOps software development methodology related theory in a form of a literature review and the second part describes planning and implementing required infrastructure-as-code automations and the actual service establishment process for the case company. The outcome of the study was a new automated project establishment process, in a form of two artifacts: process documentation and required infrastructure-as-code scripts. The study also produced a recommended way for handling the scripts and configuration files during the process, along with multiple other recommendations for similar implementations and for usage of infrastructure-as-code in general. Furthermore, results also included some recommendations for software manufacturers and a brief overview of infrastructure-as-code related risks. Infrastructure-as-code was found to be a powerful enabler of automation and suitable also for workflow automation. However, creating infrastructure-as-code scripts and building a suitable development environment were found to be difficult. Also, several target system related challenges were identified during the implementation. The conclusion considering the service establishment process was that it is feasible to delegate only configuring the infrastructure-as-code implementation to the end users.Infrastruktuuri koodina on moderni IT automaation sekä monimutkaisten ja suurten infrastruktuurien hallinnan käytäntö. Se mahdollistaa infrastruktuurin ja konfiguraation määrittelyn käyttäen ohjelmakoodia muistuttavaa syntaksia, joka on kenen tahansa ohjelmistokehittäjän ymmärrettävissä. Toisin kuin manuaaliset konfiguraatiot, infrastruktuurikoodi voidaan versioida, testata, katselmoida ja jopa kääntää, jolloin lopputuloksena saadaan luotua ja konfiguroitua määrityksen mukainen järjestelmäinfrastruktuuri. Tämän opinnäytetyön tavoitteena on luoda uusi ohjelmistoprojektien tarvitsemien palveluiden perustamisprosessi toimeksiantajayritykselle. Tavoitteena on automatisoida ja virtaviivaistaa uusien projektien aloittamista luomalla ja dokumentoimalla uusi tavanomaisten ohjelmistoprojektipalveluiden perustamisprosessi, joka hyödyntää infrastruktuuri koodina -lähestymistapaa. Yksi uuden prosessin toivotuista ominaisuuksista on siirtää tietohallinnon työkuormaa osittain projektitiimeille, joilla on paras käsitys kunkin projektin vaatimista työkaluista ja palveluista. Opinnäytetyö jakautuu kahteen osaan, joista ensimmäinen esittelee infrastruktuuri koodina lähestymistapaan ja DevOps-ohjelmistokehitysmetodologiaan liittyvää teoriaa kirjallisuuskatsauksen muodossa. Toinen osa kuvaa uuden prosessin sekä siihen kuuluvien infrastruktuurikoodien suunnittelua ja toteutusta kohdeyrityksen toimeksiannosta. Tutkimuksen lopputuloksena luotiin uusi automatisoitu projektipalveluiden perustamisprosessi, joka muodostui kahdesta artefaktista: prosessidokumentaatiosta ja vaadittavista infrastruktuuri koodina -skripteistä. Tutkimus tuotti myös suositeltavan tavan skriptien ja konfiguraatiotiedostojen hallintaan prosessin aikana sekä useita suosituksia vastaavanlaisten implementaatioiden luomiseen tulevaisuudessa ja infrastruktuuri koodina -työkalujen käyttöön yleisesti. Tulokset sisälsivät myös suosituksia ohjelmistovalmistajille sekä lyhyen katsauksen infrastruktuuri koodina -lähestymistapaan liittyvistä riskeistä. Infrastruktuuri koodina todettiin tehokkaaksi automaation mahdollistajaksi ja sopivaksi myös työnkulkujen automatisoimiseen. Toisaalta skriptien kirjoittaminen ja tarvittavan kehitysympäristön rakentaminen havaittiin haasteellisiksi tehtäviksi. Tutkimuksen edetessä havaittiin myös useita kohdejärjestelmiin liittyviä haasteita. Johtopäätös palveluiden perustamisprosessin kannalta oli, että loppukäyttäjille on järkevää ja mahdollista delegoida ainoastaan skriptien tarvitseman konfiguraation tuottaminen