Distributed Robotic Systems in the Edge-Cloud Continuum with ROS 2: a Review on Novel Architectures and Technology Readiness

Robotic systems are more connected, networked, and distributed than ever. New architectures that comply with the \textit{de facto} robotics middleware standard, ROS\,2, have recently emerged to fill the gap in terms of hybrid systems deployed from edge to cloud. This paper reviews new architectures and technologies that enable containerized robotic applications to seamlessly run at the edge or in the cloud. We also overview systems that include solutions from extension to ROS\,2 tooling to the integration of Kubernetes and ROS\,2. Another important trend is robot learning, and how new simulators and cloud simulations are enabling, e.g., large-scale reinforcement learning or distributed federated learning solutions. This has also enabled deeper integration of continuous interaction and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for robotic systems development, going beyond standard software unit tests with simulated tests to build and validate code automatically. We discuss the current technology readiness and list the potential new application scenarios that are becoming available. Finally, we discuss the current challenges in distributed robotic systems and list open research questions in the field

Integrating security solutions to support nanoCMOS electronics research

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is developing a research infrastructure for collaborative electronics research across multiple institutions in the UK with especially strong industrial and commercial involvement. Unlike other domains, the electronics industry is driven by the necessity of protecting the intellectual property of the data, designs and software associated with next generation electronics devices and therefore requires fine-grained security. Similarly, the project also demands seamless access to large scale high performance compute resources for atomic scale device simulations and the capability to manage the hundreds of thousands of files and the metadata associated with these simulations. Within this context, the project has explored a wide range of authentication and authorization infrastructures facilitating compute resource access and providing fine-grained security over numerous distributed file stores and files. We conclude that no single security solution meets the needs of the project. This paper describes the experiences of applying X.509-based certificates and public key infrastructures, VOMS, PERMIS, Kerberos and the Internet2 Shibboleth technologies for nanoCMOS security. We outline how we are integrating these solutions to provide a complete end-end security framework meeting the demands of the nanoCMOS electronics domain

Distributed Information Retrieval using Keyword Auctions

This report motivates the need for large-scale distributed approaches to information retrieval, and proposes solutions based on keyword auctions

An Innovative Workspace for The Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an initiative to build the next generation, ground-based gamma-ray observatories. We present a prototype workspace developed at INAF that aims at providing innovative solutions for the CTA community. The workspace leverages open source technologies providing web access to a set of tools widely used by the CTA community. Two different user interaction models, connected to an authentication and authorization infrastructure, have been implemented in this workspace. The first one is a workflow management system accessed via a science gateway (based on the Liferay platform) and the second one is an interactive virtual desktop environment. The integrated workflow system allows to run applications used in astronomy and physics researches into distributed computing infrastructures (ranging from clusters to grids and clouds). The interactive desktop environment allows to use many software packages without any installation on local desktops exploiting their native graphical user interfaces. The science gateway and the interactive desktop environment are connected to the authentication and authorization infrastructure composed by a Shibboleth identity provider and a Grouper authorization solution. The Grouper released attributes are consumed by the science gateway to authorize the access to specific web resources and the role management mechanism in Liferay provides the attribute-role mapping

Leveraging HTC for UK eScience with very large Condor pools: demand for transforming untapped power into results

We provide an insight into the demand from the UK eScience community for very large HighThroughput Computing resources and provide an example of such a resource in current productionuse: the 930-node eMinerals Condor pool at UCL. We demonstrate the significant benefits thisresource has provided to UK eScientists via quickly and easily realising results throughout a rangeof problem areas. We demonstrate the value added by the pool to UCL I.S infrastructure andprovide a case for the expansion of very large Condor resources within the UK eScience Gridinfrastructure. We provide examples of the technical and administrative difficulties faced whenscaling up to institutional Condor pools, and propose the introduction of a UK Condor/HTCworking group to co-ordinate the mid to long term UK eScience Condor development, deploymentand support requirements, starting with the inaugural UK Condor Week in October 2004