A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantics

This paper presents a novel ontology-driven software engineering approach for the development of industrial robotics control software. It introduces the ReApp architecture that synthesizes model-driven engineering with semantic technologies to facilitate the development and reuse of ROS-based components and applications. In ReApp, we show how different ontological classification systems for hardware, software, and capabilities help developers in discovering suitable software components for their tasks and in applying them correctly. The proposed model-driven tooling enables developers to work at higher abstraction levels and fosters automatic code generation. It is underpinned by ontologies to minimize discontinuities in the development workflow, with an integrated development environment presenting a seamless interface to the user. First results show the viability and synergy of the selected approach when searching for or developing software with reuse in mind.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2015 (arXiv:1601.00877), Stefan Zander, Georg Heppner, Georg Neugschwandtner, Ramez Awad, Marc Essinger and Nadia Ahmed: A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantic

Design of a Robotic Inspection Platform for Structural Health Monitoring

Actively monitoring infrastructure is key to detecting and correcting problems before they become costly. The vast scale of modern infrastructure poses a challenge to monitoring due to insufficient personnel. Certain structures, such as refineries, pose additional challenges and can be expensive, time-consuming, and hazardous to inspect. This thesis outlines the development of an autonomous robot for structural-health-monitoring. The robot is capable of operating autonomously in level indoor environments and can be controlled manually to traverse difficult terrain. Both visual and lidar SLAM, along with a procedural-mapping technique, allow the robot to capture colored-point-clouds. The robot is successfully able to automate the point cloud collection of straightforward environments such as hallways and empty rooms. While it performs well in these situations, its accuracy suffers in complex environments with variable lighting. More work is needed to create a robust system, but the potential time savings and upgrades make the concept promising

Advances in Human Robot Interaction for Cloud Robotics applications

In this thesis are analyzed different and innovative techniques for Human Robot Interaction. The focus of this thesis is on the interaction with flying robots. The first part is a preliminary description of the state of the art interactions techniques. Then the first project is Fly4SmartCity, where it is analyzed the interaction between humans (the citizen and the operator) and drones mediated by a cloud robotics platform. Then there is an application of the sliding autonomy paradigm and the analysis of different degrees of autonomy supported by a cloud robotics platform. The last part is dedicated to the most innovative technique for human-drone interaction in the User’s Flying Organizer project (UFO project). This project wants to develop a flying robot able to project information into the environment exploiting concepts of Spatial Augmented Realit