A real-time distributed software infrastructure for cooperating mobile autonomous robots

Cooperating mobile autonomous robots have been generating a growing interest in fields such as rescue, demining and security. These applications require a real time middleware and wireless communication protocol that can effecient and timely support the fusion of the distributed perception and the development of coordinated behaviors. This paper proposes an affordable middleware, based on low-cost and open-source COTS technologies, which relies on a real-time database partially replicated in all team members, containing both local and remote state variables, in a distributed shared memory style. This provides seamless access to the complete team state, with fast non-blocking local operations. The remote data is updated autonomously in the background by a WiFi-based wireless communication protocol, at an adequate refresh rate. The software infrastruture is complemented with a task manager that provides scheduling and synchronization services to the application processes on top of the Linux operating system. Such infrastructure has been successfully used for four years in one RoboCup middle-size soccer team, and it has proved to be dependable in the presence of uncontrolled spurious traffic in the communication channel, using an adaptive technique to synchronizating the robots in the team and reconfiguring the communications dynamically and automatically according, to the number of currently active team members

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Real-Time Communication Support for Over-water Wireless Multi-hop Networks

https://www.bsc.es/education/predoctoral-phd/doctoral-symposium/7th-bsc-so-doctoral-symposiumThe prospect scenario for wireless communications and networking technologies in aquatic environments is nowadays promising. The growing interest around this subject in the last decades has recently been accelerated due to the more powerful capabilities of a number of sensing, control and communication devices. Moored, fixed, drifting, and vehicular nodes form now a rich ecosystem of autonomous embedded systems potentially connected in a multi-hop (and over-water) fashion, which demand innovative solutions to satisfy the ever-increasing requirements of reliability, bandwidth, latency and cost. The efforts in this direction, mostly as a result of the push from the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) and related communication paradigms, are now at an early stage, and thus still pose significant, technical and research challenges, especially from the perspective of communication and networking for applications involving real-time and/or multimedia networking traffic. In this research, we focus on the communication and networking aspects of over-water multi-hop networks aiming at support real-time and/or multimedia (audio/video) traffic using IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) commodity technologies. Special attention is devoted to the impact of cyclic water-level variations (such as tides and waves) on the overall network performance, and how an integrated approach to (i) network design, (ii) protocol adaptation and (iii) routing can contribute to mitigating such an issue.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing: The Human-Data-Technology Nexus

This is an open access book. It gathers the first volume of the proceedings of the 31st edition of the International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing, FAIM 2022, held on June 19 – 23, 2022, in Detroit, Michigan, USA. Covering four thematic areas including Manufacturing Processes, Machine Tools, Manufacturing Systems, and Enabling Technologies, it reports on advanced manufacturing processes, and innovative materials for 3D printing, applications of machine learning, artificial intelligence and mixed reality in various production sectors, as well as important issues in human-robot collaboration, including methods for improving safety. Contributions also cover strategies to improve quality control, supply chain management and training in the manufacturing industry, and methods supporting circular supply chain and sustainable manufacturing. All in all, this book provides academicians, engineers and professionals with extensive information on both scientific and industrial advances in the converging fields of manufacturing, production, and automation

Solving the Task Variant Allocation Problem in Distributed Robotics

We consider the problem of assigning software processes (or tasks) to hardware processors in distributed robotics environments. We introduce the notion of a task variant, which supports the adaptation of software to specific hardware configurations. Task variants facilitate the trade-off of functional quality versus the requisite capacity and type of target execution processors. We formalise the problem of assigning task variants to processors as a mathematical model that incorporates typical constraints found in robotics applications; the model is a constrained form of a multi-objective, multi-dimensional, multiple-choice knapsack problem. We propose and evaluate three different solution methods to the problem: constraint programming, a constructive greedy heuristic and a local search metaheuristic. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of task variants in a real instance of a distributed interactive multi-agent navigation system, showing that our best solution method (constraint programming) improves the system’s quality of service, as compared to the local search metaheuristic, the greedy heuristic and a randomised solution, by an average of 16, 31 and 56% respectively