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

Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems

Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained, and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability, reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server communication.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Science & Emerging Technologies (IJSET), Vol. 3, No. 2, February 201

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

AltURI: a thin middleware for simulated robot vision applications

Fast software performance is often the focus when developing real-time vision-based control applications for robot simulators. In this paper we have developed a thin, high performance middleware for USARSim and other simulators designed for real-time vision-based control applications. It includes a fast image server providing images in OpenCV, Matlab or web formats and a simple command/sensor processor. The interface has been tested in USARSim with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using two control applications; landing using a reinforcement learning algorithm and altitude control using elementary motion detection. The middleware has been found to be fast enough to control the flying robot as well as very easy to set up and use

Towards Assistive Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator

General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5 successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of success for the system's autonomous behaviors. Also, Henry Evans, a person with severe quadriplegia, operated the system remotely to feed an able-bodied person. In general, people who operated the system reported that it was easy to use, including Henry. The feeding system also incorporates corrective actions designed to be triggered either autonomously or by the user. In an offline evaluation using data collected with the feeding system, a new version of our multimodal anomaly detection system outperformed prior versions.Comment: This short 4-page paper was accepted and presented as a poster on May. 16, 2016 in ICRA 2016 workshop on 'Human-Robot Interfaces for Enhanced Physical Interactions' organized by Arash Ajoudani, Barkan Ugurlu, Panagiotis Artemiadis, Jun Morimoto. It was peer reviewed by one reviewe

A Software Suite for the Control and the Monitoring of Adaptive Robotic Ecologies

Adaptive robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices (sensors, actuators, automated appliances) pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they learn to cooperate towards the achievement of complex tasks. While their flexibility makes them an increasingly popular way to improve a system’s reliability, scalability, robustness and autonomy, their effective realisation demands integrated control and software solutions for the specification, integration and management of their highly heterogeneous and computational constrained components. In this extended abstract we briefly illustrate the characteristic requirements dictated by robotic ecologies, discuss our experience in developing adaptive robotic ecologies, and provide an overview of the specific solutions developed as part of the EU FP7 RUBICON Project