A ROS2 based communication architecture for control in collaborative and intelligent automation systems

Collaborative robots are becoming part of intelligent automation systems in modern industry. Development and control of such systems differs from traditional automation methods and consequently leads to new challenges. Thankfully, Robot Operating System (ROS) provides a communication platform and a vast variety of tools and utilities that can aid that development. However, it is hard to use ROS in large-scale automation systems due to communication issues in a distributed setup, hence the development of ROS2. In this paper, a ROS2 based communication architecture is presented together with an industrial use-case of a collaborative and intelligent automation system.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, to be published in the proceedings of 29th International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing (FAIM2019), June 201

The Digital Foundation Platform -- A Multi-layered SOA Architecture for Intelligent Connected Vehicle Operating System

Legacy AD/ADAS development from OEMs centers around developing functions on ECUs using services provided by AUTOSAR Classic Platform (CP) to meet automotive-grade and mass-production requirements. The AUTOSAR CP couples hardware and software components statically and encounters challenges to provide sufficient capacities for the processing of high-level intelligent driving functions, whereas the new platform, AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform (AP) is designed to support dynamically communication and provide richer services and function abstractions for those resource-intensive (memory, CPU) applications. Yet for both platforms, application development and the supporting system software are still closely coupled together, and this makes application development and the enhancement less scalable and flexible, resulting in longer development cycles and slower time-to-market. This paper presents a multi-layered, service-oriented intelligent driving operating system foundation (we named it as Digital Foundation Platform) that provides abstractions for easier adoption of heterogeneous computing hardware. It features a multi-layer SOA software architecture with each layer providing adaptive service API at north-bound for application developers. The proposed Digital Foundation Platform (DFP) has significant advantages of decoupling hardware, operating system core, middle-ware, functional software and application software development. It provides SOA at multiple layers and enables application developers from OEMs, to customize and develop new applications or enhance existing applications with new features, either in autonomous domain or intelligent cockpit domain, with great agility, and less code through re-usability, and thus reduce the time-to-market.Comment: WCX SAE World Congress Experience 202

An Optimized, Data Distribution Service-Based Solution for Reliable Data Exchange Among Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Major challenges are presented when managing a large number of heterogeneous vehicles that have to communicate underwater in order to complete a global mission in a cooperative manner. In this kind of application domain, sending data through the environment presents issues that surpass the ones found in other overwater, distributed, cyber-physical systems (i.e., low bandwidth, unreliable transport medium, data representation and hardware high heterogeneity). This manuscript presents a Publish/Subscribe-based semantic middleware solution for unreliable scenarios and vehicle interoperability across cooperative and heterogeneous autonomous vehicles. The middleware relies on different iterations of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) software standard and their combined work between autonomous maritime vehicles and a control entity. It also uses several components with different functionalities deemed as mandatory for a semantic middleware architecture oriented to maritime operations (device and service registration, context awareness, access to the application layer) where other technologies are also interweaved with middleware (wireless communications, acoustic networks). Implementation details and test results, both in a laboratory and a deployment scenario, have been provided as a way to assess the quality of the system and its satisfactory performanceEuropean Commission H2020. SWARMs European project (Smart and Networking Underwater Robots in Cooperation Meshes), under Grant Agreement No. 662107-SWARMs-ECSEL-2014-1, partially supported by the ECSEL JU, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref: PCIN-2014-022-C02-02)

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain

Real-Time QoS-Aware Vehicle Tracking: An Experimental and Comparative Study

AbstractRecently, web service became popular for Real-time Communication (RTC). It allows bi-directional, real-time communication between web clients and server. On the other hand, Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware offers unified integration with high-performance due to its scalability, flexibility, real-time, mission-critical networks and rich QoS features. DDS is based on the publish/subscribe communication model. It improves RTC through its efficient and high-performance data delivery mechanism. This paper studies and investigates that how DDS is better for RTC. Experimental studies are conducted to compare text messaging using socket IO over DDS Web API. The result concerns the throughput satisfaction rate, round trip time and packet loss. In addition, we consider some of QoS of DDS during experimental work e.g. deadline, time based filter etc