In this paper, a cloud-based mission control architecture is proposed to achieve flexible remote access and coordinated mission control among a fleet of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). First, a ...cloud-based mission control architecture that renders easy, timely and prioritized remote access to the USVs regardless of the remote operator’s location is proposed. It is achieved by leveraging remote cloud-based technology and local Operating onboard System. Decentralized property of the architecture accomplishes scalable monitoring, remote control, data acquisition and missions sharing for an USV fleet. Second, the related software interfaces are required for this task: the user interface of the remote client that is used for mission control/planning and data visualization and that is applicable across mobile robotic systems; and the back-end interface for the local USVs that bridges robotic and cloud server and provides seamless integration with the well-established Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is nowadays, the most widely used framework for robotics developments. Furthermore, the proposed cloud-based mission control architecture is implemented on a fleet of real vehicles, H2Omni-X USVs, and the performance of the remote experimentation is demonstrated during sea trials at the Adriatic coast, Croatia, representing the practical contribution of this paper.
This paper investigates the trajectory tracking control of an autonomous tracked vehicle. First, the desired linear and angular velocities are evaluated based on vehicle’s kinematics. An optimized ...backstepping controller is proposed as the kinematic controller, whereas the controller gains are optimally obtained. Next, an integral sliding mode control (SMC) is exploited based on vehicle dynamics and slipping characteristics, to obtain the desired torques that drive the vehicle and converge its trajectory to the desired one. Moreover, stability analysis of the whole system is proven based on Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulations and real-time experiments based on robot operating system (ROS) implementation are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm and compared with a hybrid backstepping-modified PID dynamic controller.
This article proposes a general approach to solve the hand-eye calibration problem. The system is general since it is able to calibrate any number of cameras and, moreover, is able to simultaneously ...perform the calibration of several instances of the two common hand-eye calibration use cases: eye-on-hand and eye-to-base. The calibration is solved with a nonlinear least squares method, and the reprojection error is used as a metric to guide the optimization procedure. Our approach is seamlessly integrated with the robot operating system framework and allows for the interactive positioning of sensors and labeling of data, facilitating both the data acquisition and labeling and the calibration procedures. Results show that the proposed approach is able to handle any calibration use case with a minimal initial configuration. The approach is compared with several other state-of-the-art hand-eye calibration algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach produces very accurate calibrations when compared to the state of the art.
Autonomous robots are designed to support humans in diverse ways including companionship and assistance, as technology evolves, the burden of physical tasks which were performed by humans in the past ...are getting reduced. Autonomous guidance and navigation are popular fields that use mobile robots to replace humans. These robots are widely used in space, defence, education, and industry and require navigating safely through different environments. A significant aspect of Autonomous Robot Navigation is an obstacle and pedestrian avoidance. Most of the outdoor guiding robots follow the concept of SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) for moving from the initial point to the goal point. Moreover, image processing plays a vital role in the detection and recognition between humans and objects. The existing methodology comprises implementing autonomous tour guide robots are based in embedded systems which has a high degree of recognition accuracy. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing autonomous campus and tour guiding robots. This paper is steered at providing a satellite view of these existing assemblies and the advances made with them.
Visible light positioning (VLP) is widely believed to be a cost-effective answer to the growing demand for service-based indoor positioning. Meanwhile, high accuracy localization is very important ...for mobile robots in various scenes including industrial, domestic and public transportation workspace. In this paper, an indoor robot VLP localization system based on Robot Operating System (ROS) is presented for the first time, aiming at promoting the application of VLP in mature robotic system. On the basis of our previous researches, we innovatively designed a VLP localization package which contains the basic operation control of the robots, the features extraction and recognition of the LED-ID, cm-level positioning, and robust dynamic tracking algorithms. This package exploited the proposed lightweight algorithm, distributed framework design, the loose coupling characteristics of the ROS, and the message communication methods among different nodes. What's more, an efficient LED-ID detection scheme is proposed to ensure the lightweight and accuracy of the positioning. A prototype system has been implemented on a Turtlebot3 Robot 11 Experiment Demonstration is available at: https://kwanwaipang.github.io/Image/ROS.mp4.. Experimental results show that the proposed system can provide robot indoor positioning accuracy within 1 cm and an average computational time of only 0.08 s.
Distributed robotic systems rely heavily on the publish–subscribe communication paradigm and middleware frameworks that support it, such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), to efficiently implement ...modular computation graphs. The ROS 2 executor, a high-level task scheduler which handles ROS 2 messages, is a performance bottleneck. We extend ros2_tracing, a framework with instrumentation and tools for real-time tracing of ROS 2, with the analysis and visualization of the flow of messages across distributed ROS 2 systems. Our method detects one-to-many and many-to-many causal links between input and output messages, including indirect causal links through simple user-level annotations. We validate our method on both synthetic and real robotic systems, and demonstrate its low runtime overhead. Moreover, the underlying intermediate execution representation database can be further leveraged to extract additional metrics and high-level results. This can provide valuable timing and scheduling information to further study and improve the ROS 2 executor as well as optimize any ROS 2 system. The source code is available at: github.com/christophebedard/ros2-message-flow-analysis.
In this paper, we proposed a novel multi-robot collaborative exploration method to improve the efficiency and robustness of multi-robot exploration in unknown environments. Firstly, a novel frontier ...detection algorithm based on hybrid multi-strategy rapidly-exploring random tree (HMS-RRT) is proposed, which is composed of an adaptive incremental distance strategy, a subregion sampling strategy and a greedy frontier-based exploration strategy. To improve the frontier detection performance of the algorithm, we adopt the Voronoi diagram to continuously partition the explored region, and dynamically adjust the incremental distance according to the density of obstacles in the subregions. To avoid the algorithm is trapped in the local optimum, we use Gaussian distribution to calculate the sampling probability in each subregion, so that the algorithm tends to sample in the subregion with lower crowded level of nodes and cover the unexplored regions quickly. Secondly, we introduce the greedy frontier-based exploration strategy to explore all Voronoi polygons in turn and refine the search results, meanwhile, the centroid of each frontier region is extracted as the exploration target point. Then, a multi-robot task assignment strategy based on improved market mechanism is introduced to dynamically assign the exploration target points to each robot, and the map-merging algorithm is used in the exploration process to merge several local maps in real-time. Finally, an experimental testing platform is developed based on Robot Operating System (ROS) and a series of experiments are carried out. The results show that our method can improve the efficiency and reliability of multi-robot exploration in both the simulations and the prototype experiments.
The manufacturing industry of the future requires innovative approaches to optimize operational efficiency and adaptability. Integrating context-awareness into workflow management systems has emerged ...as a promising avenue to enhance efficiency in modern manufacturing processes. This research presents an innovative context-aware workflow management architecture designed to address industry-related challenges and overcome current limitations in the state-of-the-art. The architecture leverages Industry 4.0 standards for asset representation and workflow notation while incorporating a Context Analyzer component for real-time context interpretation. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated in a real-world manufacturing setting, specifically in the scenario of collecting work order materials using the Robot Operating System (ROS) technology for robot navigation. The evaluation showcases improvements in task completion rate, resource utilization, and task completion time. These outcomes exemplify the potential benefits of incorporating context-awareness into manufacturing workflows, providing insights for further improvements. Contributions include advancing the understanding of context-aware workflow management, a review of the challenges that cap its adoption in the manufacturing domain, a qualitative comparison of similar approaches, practical implementation of the proposed architecture, evaluation of the context-aware component, and provision of the source code and datasets to the community for future advancement and reproducibility.
•Advancing standardization of manufacturing processes with BPMN and AAS integration.•Enhancing manufacturing efficiency through context-aware workflow management.•ROS-based robots in a real-world manufacturing case study.•The proposed solution improved task completion rate, time, and energy saving.
This work presents a simulation framework developed under the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS) to enable the validation of robotics systems and gas sensing algorithms under realistic ...environments. The framework is rooted in the principles of computational fluid dynamics and filament dispersion theory, modeling wind flow and gas dispersion in 3D real-world scenarios (i.e., accounting for walls, furniture, etc.). Moreover, it integrates the simulation of different environmental sensors, such as metal oxide gas sensors, photo ionization detectors, or anemometers. We illustrate the potential and applicability of the proposed tool by presenting a simulation case in a complex and realistic office-like environment where gas leaks of different chemicals occur simultaneously. Furthermore, we accomplish quantitative and qualitative validation by comparing our simulated results against real-world data recorded inside a wind tunnel where methane was released under different wind flow profiles. Based on these results, we conclude that our simulation framework can provide a good approximation to real world measurements when advective airflows are present in the environment.
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