Experimental Evaluation of the Real-Time Performance of Publish-Subscribe Middlewares

REACTION 2013. 2nd International Workshop on Real-time and distributed computing in emerging applications. December 3rd, 2013, Vancouver, Canada.The integration of the complex network of modules composing a modern distributed embedded systems calls for a middleware solution striking a good tradeoff between conflicting needs such as: modularity, architecture independence, re-use, easy access to the limited hardware resources and ability to respect real–time constraints. Several middleware architectures proposed in the last years offer reliable and easy to use abstractions and intuitive publish-subscribe mechanism that can simplify system development to a good degree. However, a complete compliance with the different requirements of assistive robotics application (first and foremost real–time constraints) remains to be investigated. This paper evaluates the performance of these solutions in terms of latency and scalability

Competitive Robotic Car: Sensing, Planning and Architecture Design

Research towards a complete autonomous car has been pushed through by industries as it offers numerous advantages such as the improvement to traffic flow, vehicle and pedestrian safety, and car efficiency. One of the main challenges faced in this area is how to deal with different uncertainties perceived by the sensors on the current state of the car and the environment. An autonomous car needs to employ efficient planning algorithm that generates the vehicle trajectory based on the environmental sensing implemented in real-time. An complete motion planning algorithm is an algorithm that returns a valid solution if one exist in finite time and returns no path exist when none exist. The algorithm is optimal when it returns an optimal path based on some criteria. In this thesis we work on a special case of motion planning problem: to find an optimal trajectory for a robotic car in order to win a car race. We propose an efficient realtime vision based technique for localization and path reconstruction. For our purpose of winning a car race we identify a characterization of the alphabet of optimal maneuvers for the car, an optimal local planning strategy and an optimal graph-based global planning strategy with obstacle avoidance. We have also implemented the hardware and software of this approach on as a testbed of the planning strategy

Navigation assistance and guidance of older adults across complex public spaces: the DALi approach

The Devices for Assisted Living(DALi ) project is a research initiative sponsored by the European Commission under the FP7 programme aiming for the development of a robotic device to assist people with cognitive impairments in navigating complex environments. The project revisits the popular paradigm of the walker enriching it with sensing abilities (to perceive the environment), with cognitive abilities (to decide the best path across the space) and with mechanical, visual, acoustic and haptic guidance devices (to guide the person along the path). In this paper, we offer an overview of the developed system and describe in detail some of its most important technological aspects