Modular Research Platform for Robot-Assisted Minimally-Invasive Surgery

One of the challenges of outdoor robots is developing effective portable Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) frameworks. Hand-held devices offer a practical solution. By equipping these devices with robot software, they can be made to interact with the outdoor robots. Android devices are ideal as they are open source and can be integrated with robots powered by the Robot Operating System (ROS), also open source. However, due to the limits of rosjava, the mechanism that links ROS with android, and the conflicting modes of operation between ROS and android, current implementations of ROS-android offer limited robot applications that do not support advanced operations such as autonomous navigation and others. This paper implements selective compartmentalization to overcome these limitations, by combining ROS with android through a number of ROS and android bridges that would facilitate the development of advanced robot applications. Through the proposed method, authors were able to develop a portable HRI framework that allowed human operators to supervise an outdoor mobile robot while it performed an autonomous task. From their mobile devices, users were able to initialize the robot, configure its motion, and monitor its progress. Also, users were able to reprogram the robot to perform new tasks (not previously planned) through a creative use of features offered in the developed HRI framework. Also, user cognitive effort was reported to be low as evident by the positive score on the NASA-TLX scale test which was corroborated with robot performance data. This paper presents the detailed development and implementation steps.

Robots are becoming more and more commonplace in many industry settings. This successful adoption can be partly attributed to (1) their increasingly affordable cost and (2) the possibility of developing intelligent, software-driven robots. Unfortunately, robotics software consumes significant amounts of energy. Moreover, robots are often battery-driven, meaning that even a small energy improvement can help reduce its energy footprint and increase its autonomy and user experience.In this paper, we study the Robot Operating System (ROS) ecosystem, the de-facto standard for developing and prototyping robotics software. We analyze 527 energy-related data points (including commits, pull-requests and issues on ROS-related repositories, ROS-related questions on StackOverflow, ROS Discourse, ROS Answers and the official ROS Wiki).Our results include a quantification of the interest of roboticists on software energy efficiency, 10 recurrent causes and 14 solutions of energy-related issues, and their implied trade-offs with respect to other quality attributes. Those contributions support roboticists and researchers towards having energy-efficient software in future robotics projects.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a popular framework and ecosystem that allows developers to build robot software systems from reusable, off-the-shelf components. Systems are often built by customizing and connecting components via configuration files. While reusable components theoretically allow rapid prototyping, ensuring proper configuration and connection is challenging, as evidenced by numerous questions on developer forums. Developers must abide to the often unchecked and unstated assumptions of individual components. Failure to do so can result in misconfigurations that are only discovered during field deployment, at which point errors may lead to unpredictable and dangerous behavior. Despite misconfigurations having been studied in the broader context of software engineering, robotics software (and ROS in particular) poses domain-specific challenges with potentially disastrous consequences. To understand and improve the reliability of ROS projects, it is critical to identify the types of misconfigurations faced by developers. To that end, we perform a study of ROS Answers, a Q&A platform, to identify and categorize misconfigurations that occur during ROS development. We then conduct a literature review to assess the coverage of these misconfigurations by existing detection techniques. In total, we find 12 high-level categories and 50 sub-categories of misconfigurations. Of these categories, 27 are not covered by existing techniques. To conclude, we discuss how to tackle those misconfigurations in future work.

Middleware for robotics development must meet demanding requirements in real-time distributed embedded systems. The Robot Operating System (ROS), open-source middleware, has been widely used for robotics applications. However, the ROS is not suitable for real-time embedded systems because it does not satisfy real-time requirements and only runs on a few OSs. To address this problem, ROS1 will undergo a significant upgrade to ROS2 by utilizing the Data Distribution Service (DDS). DDS is suitable for real-time distributed embedded systems due to its various transport configurations (e.g., deadline and fault-tolerance) and scalability. ROS2 must convert data for DDS and abstract DDS from its users; however, this incurs additional overhead, which is examined in this study. Transport latencies between ROS2 nodes vary depending on the use cases, data size, configurations, and DDS vendors. We conduct proof of concept for DDS approach to ROS and arrange DDS characteristic and guidelines from various evaluations. By highlighting the DDS capabilities, we explore and evaluate the potential and constraints of DDS and ROS2.

Common challenges in the area of robotics include issues such as sensor modeling, dynamic operating environments, and limited on-broad computational resources. To improve decision making, robots need a dependable framework to facilitate communication between different modules and the optimal action for real-world applications. The Robotics Operating System (ROS) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two promising approaches that help accomplish precise control, seamless integration of sensors-actuators, and exhibit learned behavior. The ROS enables seamless communication between heterogeneous components, while RL focuses on learning optimal behaviors through trial-and-error scenarios. Combining the ROS and RL offers superior decision making, improved perception, enhanced automation, and reliability. This work focuses on investigating ROS-based RL applications across various domains, aiming to enhance understanding through comprehensive discussion, analysis, and summarization. We base our evaluation on the application area, type of RL algorithm used, and degree of ROS–RL integration. Additionally, we provide summary of seminal works that define the current state of the art, along with GitHub repositories and resources for research purposes. Based on the review of successfully implemented projects, we make recommendations highlighting the advantages and limitations of RL techniques for specific applications and environments. The ultimate goal of this work is to advance the robotics field by providing a comprehensive overview of the recent important works that incorporate both the ROS and RL, thereby improving the adaptability of these emerging techniques.

Robot Operating system (ROS) is collection of software frameworks for robot software development. Researchers that work with ROS will have an opportunity to use or to be exact to reuse any software framework from another researcher as long as they use a similar robot platform, or similar device that has been include in the ROS. This paper present a design for a low cost rotating Lidar that compatible with ROS. As all we know distance measurement is the basic for building an autonomous capability for robots. Rotating lidar is among one the most popular device used to acquire this kind of information. However most of them are not suitable for low budget project because of their high cost. The design presented here tries to build a low cost rotating lidar based on Lidar Lite device with the compatibility with the ROS. The design incorporate a control board based on a microcontroller.

The general objective of the research was to determine the advances related to the robotics and artificial intelligence. The specific objectives of the research are to determine the countries and organizations that successfully manufacture robots, identify the characteristics of the most representative robots and the software used in their design and operation. Methodology, in this research, 61 documents have been selected, carried out in the period 2018 - 2024; including: scientific articles, review articles and information from websites of recognized organizations. Results, the software used in the design and operation of the robots are: Robot operating systems (ros), industrial robot programming software, simulation software, robot vision software, autonomous navigation software, collaborative robot (cobot) software. Conclusions, artificial intelligence has been evolving and has managed to position itself as an important technology to improve various systems. The leading robotics producers are in Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. The organizations that successfully manufacture robots are ABB Group (Switzerland), Adept Technology Inc (United States) and Apex Automation and Robotics (Australia). And the software used in the design and operation of the robots are: Robot operating systems (ros), industrial robot programming software, simulation software, robot vision software, autonomous navigation software, collaborative robot (cobot) software.

Omni-directional Wheeled Mobile Robots (Omni-WMR) are holonomic system able to move sideways. They have locomotive advantage and are widely deployed in a larger range of application fields, especially in narrowly constrained service-styled manufacturing industries. To ensure smooth motion and full development of locomotive advantages, motion planning draws great attention. Thanks to the mechanism of powered caster wheel (PCW), the motion of Omni-WMR can be decoupled. The collective motion can be decomposed into dimensions of x, y and θ, then planned independently and superposed. In this way trajectory can be planned in the Cartesian space, and later on transformed to the joint space through inverse instantaneous kinematics model for actuation of the motor at each joint. Quintic-polynomial interpolation is used for the case of start to goal with only initial and final configurations known, and piecewise-cubic-spline interpolation is applied for the case of a sequence of intermediate way-points known in the configuration space as input. Here the geometric points for the robot to go through are assumed to be known as a priori without loss of generality. The approaches are implemented in python on ROS (Robot Operating System), and these modular ROS packages are tested on a physical Omni-WMR developed at our lab. Meanwhile, these ROS packages are also tested equivalently in a virtual simulation environment modelled using ROS stage simulator. The experimental results have proved that the motion planning algorithms are able to generate smooth velocity profile for the robot to achieve the goal, which have validated the effectiveness of these algorithms.

최근 로봇 소프트웨어 플랫폼의 연구는 로봇 기기들의 추상화를 통해 지능형 서비스를 제공하는데 초점을 두고 있다. 사물인터넷 환경에서 지능형 로봇 서비스를 제공하기 위해서는 이기종 센서들의 환경정보를 인지하는 상황인지 기술이 필요하다. ROS는 로봇 디바이스를 추상화하는 기술을 바탕으로 로봇을 사용한다. ROS는 로봇을 제어하기 위해 이기종 센서 자체를 추상화하는 기능을 포함하고 있으나, 일관된 수집 방법을 통한 환경 정보를 바탕으로 로봇이 인지할 수 있는 상황 정보를 제공하는 기능은 결여되어 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 ROS가 상황인지 기반의 로봇 서비스를 제공하는데 필요한 중계 시스템을 제안한다. 제안하는 시스템은 로봇이 인지할 수 있는 추상화된 상황정보를 제공하는 외부의 상황인지 시스템과 로봇을 제어하는 ROS를 중계하여, ROS가 상황인지 로봇 서비스를 제공할 수 있도록 도와준다. 실험에서는 제안하는 시스템을 바탕으로, 상황인지 시스템과 ROS에서 추상화된 로봇 서비스를 연동하여 로봇 서비스를 실행시키는 과정을 보인다. Recent robot software platform research focuses on providing intelligent service via abstraction of robot devices. Context-aware techniques are necessary for intelligent robot services, which are based on the perception of environmental information obtained from heterogeneous sensors in IoT environment. Robot Operating System (ROS) provides protocols to operate robot devices. ROS includes functions for abstracting heterogeneous sensors themselves in order to control the robot, however, it lacks the ability to provide context information that the robot can perceive based on environmental information through consistent collection methods. In this paper, we propose a relay system for ROS to provide context-aware robot service. The proposed system makes it possible for ROS to control and provide context-aware robot services with relay of an external context-aware system and ROS. In experiments, we demonstrate procedures that robot services abstracted from ROS and an external context-aware system works together based on the proposed system.

There are many ways to build the software for a Middle Size League (MSL) robot. A common problem in developing software for any long-term project including MSL is enabling future developers to maintain and continue further research on the project. A solution to this problem is to use an already existing software development framework. In recent years, the Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the ’de facto’ standard framework for robotics software development. This paper will explore the advantages found in using ROS as the framework to build a software for a robot The three main advantages that were found in using ROS are data sharing, hardware abstraction, and program concurrency. These advantages allowed the team to build modular software that is more maintainable. Furthermore, there was minimum computation cost found in using ROS. Lastly, the locomotion system was tested. When given a linear movement command, the locomotion system has an average actual distance error of 8.84 cm with a standard deviation of 6.70 cm. It is also found that the average computed error is 3.54 cm with a standard deviation of 1.49 cm.

We present software for interfacing FITPix and USB Lite compatible readout electronics using Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is widely adopted middleware for integration of sensors, processing algorithms and logic to autonomous systems such as robots, unmanned helicopters, and robotic payloads. Thanks to ROS, Timepix detectors can be deployed in automated experiments on platforms spanning from traditional desktop computers to small ARM devices such as Raspberry Pi and Odroid. Acquisition and detector settings can be controlled in Linux shell allowing deployment on headless devices. Using ROS networking capabilities, captured frames and detector control can be transmitted via a network, which allows building distributed processing pipelines. The proposed software is a lightweight package, easily connectable to existing visualization, logging, and processing software in ROS. It offers simple bindings to custom Python and C++ programs for real-time control of the acquisition or processing of the captured frames. Rospix was deployed on NASA suborbital rocket, which was successfully launched on April 4, 2018, from Kwajalein Atoll by Pennsylvania State University. Rospix provides reliable solution for mobile robots where the collected data are used in real time to guide the robot through an environment. We release Rospix using the GitHub platform and welcome the community to contribute on the first project connecting the fields of ionizing radiation imaging and mobile robotics.

MOPS is a platform for surgical robotics research. It consists of hardware and software components for building surgical robot systems based on existing robot arms. The reference system presented in this paper has two robot arms, each with an adapter for mounting and actuating different types of surgical instruments. Additionally, the system has a high-resolution stereo camera and a simple operator console with haptic devices and foot pedals for teleoperating the manipulators. Software components are based on Robot Operating System (ROS) to keep them modular and reusable for different types of hardware. We evaluate the precision of our system for vision-based tasks and demonstrate its potential for surgical task automation. The mean end-to-end error, including that of the vision system, for a trajectory following task was 1.2mm / 0.3° for one manipulator and 2.7mm / 0.7° for the other. MOPS software and hardware components are made available under an open-source license to encourage collaboration and facilitate the advancement of surgical robotics research.

A review of robotic systems was carried out. The paper analyzes applied hardware and software solutions and summarizes the most common block diagrams of control systems. The analysis of approaches to control systems scaling, the use of intelligent control, the achievement of fault tolerance, and the reduction of the weight and size of control system elements belonging to various classes of robotic systems were carried out. The goal of the review is finding common approaches used in various areas of robotics to build on their basis a uniform methodology for designing scalable intelligent control systems for robots with a given level of fault tolerance on a unified component base. This part is dedicated to service robotics. The following conclusions are made on the basis of the review results: the key technology in service robotics from the point of view of scalability is the Robot Operating System (ROS); service robotics is today the main springboard for testing intelligent algorithms for the tactical and strategic control levels that are integrated into a common system based on ROS; the problem of ensuring fault tolerance in the service robotics is practically neglected, with the exception of the issue of increasing reliability by changing behavioral algorithms; in a number of areas of service robotics, in which the reduction of mass and dimensions is especially important, the robot control systems are implemented on a single computing device, in other cases a multi-level architecture implemented on Linux-based embedded computers with ROS are used.

This study utilized the Robot Operating System (ROS) to simulate various poses of humanoid robot. The distributed ROS architectures efficiently communicate with each other point to make sure the correct sequential procedures and execute full information exchange through the peer to peer topology. Humanoid robot software designed in Linux-based ROS environment to integrate the software and hardware system plant through ROS. The advanced Gazebo presents the cyber-physical behavior of humanoid robot in the reality experiments.

Robot systems are growing in importance and complexity. Ecosystems for robot software, such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), provide libraries of reusable software components that can be configured and composed into larger systems. To support compositionality, ROS uses late binding and architecture configuration via “launch files” that describe how to initialize the components in a system. However, late binding often leads to systems failing silently due to misconfiguration, for example by misrouting or dropping messages entirely.In this paper we present ROSDiscover, which statically recovers the run-time architecture of ROS systems to find such architecture misconfiguration bugs. First, ROSDiscover constructs component level architectural models (ports, parameters) from source code. Second, architecture configuration files are analyzed to compose the system from these component models and derive the connections in the system. Finally, the reconstructed architecture is checked against architectural rules described in first-order logic to identify potential misconfigurations.We present an evaluation of ROSDiscover on real world, off-the-shelf robotic systems, measuring the accuracy, effectiveness, and practicality of our approach. To that end, we collected the first data set of architecture configuration bugs in ROS from popular open-source systems and measure how effective our approach is for detecting configuration bugs in that set.