MROS: Runtime Adaptation For Robot Control Architectures

Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with contingencies arising from dynamic environments-otherwise, these affect the reliability and quality of the mission execution. Existing proposals on how to build self-adaptive systems in robotics usually require a major re-design of the control architecture and rely on complex tools unfamiliar to the robotics community. Moreover, they are hard to reuse across applications. This paper presents MROS: a model-based framework for run-time adaptation of robot control architectures based on ROS. MROS uses a combination of domain-specific languages to model architectural variants and captures mission quality concerns, and an ontology-based implementation of the MAPE-K and meta-control visions for run-time adaptation. The experiment results obtained applying MROS in two realistic ROS-based robotic demonstrators show the benefits of our approach in terms of the quality of the mission execution, and MROS' extensibility and re-usability across robotic applications

Modellering och hardware-in-the-loopsimulering av kontaktordynamik : Mekanik, elektromagnetism och mjukvara

This master thesis’s subject is to model an ABB contactor’s dynamics and to develop a hardware-in-the-loop simulation environment. The hardware-in-the-loop method utilizes computer models that are simulated in a real-time simulator. The real-time simulator is connected to hardware components. A contactor is an electrically controlled mechanical switching device and it is used in circuits where large currents can occur. In this thesis, the contactor is divided into three separate subsystems and models are developed for each of them. The three subsystems correspond to the contactor’s mechanics, electromagnetics and electronic components. Computer models are implemented in MATLAB and Simulink to realize the subsystems. The hardware part, of the hardware-in-the-loop simulations, consists of electronic parts that are not modeled. To connect the hardware part to a real-time simulator, from dSPACE, a hardware interface was constructed. This report focuses on the modeling of the mechanics and the electromagnetics as well as the software implementations. The thesis work was carried out in collaboration with another student. The focuses of his report are the modeling of the electronics and the construction of the hardware interface. Validation of the hardware-in-the-loop simulations is done by using measurements collected from a real contactor. The conclusion is that the simulations of the contactor’s behavior correspond well with a real contactor