69 research outputs found
Towards reliable and scalable robot communication
Get PDFThe Robot Operating System (ROS) is the de facto standard platform
for modern robots. However, communication between ROS nodes
has scalability and reliability issues in practice. In this paper, we
investigate whether Erlangâs lightweight concurrency and reliability
mechanisms have the potential to address these issues. The basis
of the investigation is a pair of simple but typical robotic control
applications, namely two face-trackers: one using ROS publish/subscribe
messaging, and the other a bespoke Erlang communication
framework.
We report experiments that compare five key aspects of the
ROS and Erlang face trackers. We find that Erlang communication
scales better, supporting at least 3.5 times more active processes
(700 processes) than its ROS-based counterpart (200 nodes) while
consuming half of the memory. However, while both face tracking
prototypes exhibit similar detection accuracy and transmission
latencies with 10 or fewer workers, Erlang exhibits a continuous
increase in the total time taken to process a frame as more agents
are added, and we identify the cause. A reliability study shows
that while both ROS and Erlang restart failed computations, the
Erlang processes restart 1000â1500 times faster than ROS nodes,
reducing robot component downtime and mitigating the impact of
the failures
Intelligent Joystick Sensing the User's Emotion and Providing Biofeedback
Get PDFDevelopment of an intelligent joystick is proposed which senses the userâs bio-signals and
recognises the userâs emotion. It provides biofeedback to the user as well as the userâs emotional
state information to the computer allowing human-computer interaction over sensitive
environment. While the user is interacting with a computer via a joystick the bio-signals can be
collected through the userâs fingers touching it. The collected bio-signals information is mapped
on a two-dimensional space to find out the quality and intensity of emotion continuously and in a
real-time manner. The intelligent joystick has application within several fields such as healthcare,
sport and game industries. In such cases, the user can be influenced, or suffer from medical
problems while under stress during interaction with the machines. The intelligent joystick will
provide feedback to the user and alert alarm about unhealthy conditions through the embedded
actuators and allow the machine to adapt with the usersâ emotional state
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