Internet of Things allow massive number of uniquely addressable “things” to communicate with each other and transfer data over existing internet or compatible network protocols. This paper proposes a new concept which tackles the issues for supporting control and monitoring activities at deployment sites and industrial automations, where intelligent things can monitor peripheral events, induce sensor data acquired from a variety of sources, use ad hoc, local, and distributed “machine intelligence” to determine appropriate course of actions, and then act to control or disseminate static or dynamic position aware robotic things in the physical world through a seamless manner by providing a means for utilizing them as Internet of robotic things (IoRT). Although progressive advancements can be seen in multi-robotic systems, robots are constantly getting enriched by easier developmental functionalities, such vertical robotic service centric silos are not enough for continuously and seamlessly supporting for which they are meant. In this paper, a novel concept-IoRT is presented that highlights architectural principles, vital characteristics, as well as research challenges. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the architectural assimilation of IoRT and identify important research directions on this term.

Internet of Robotic Things: Concept, Technologies, and Challenges

A Comprehensive Survey of Recent Trends in Cloud Robotics Architectures and Applications

Collaborative robots represent a clear added value to manufacturing, as they promise to increase productivity and improve working conditions of such environments. Although modern robotic systems have become safe and reliable enough to operate close to human workers on a day-to-day basis, the workload is still skewed in favor of a limited contribution from the robot's side, and a significant cognitive load is allotted to the human. We believe the transition from robots as recipients of human instruction to robots as capable collaborators hinges around the implementation of transparent systems, where mental models about the task are shared between peers, and the human partner is freed from the responsibility of taking care of both actors. In this work, we implement a transparent task planner able to be deployed in realistic, near-future applications. The proposed framework is capable of basic reasoning capabilities for what concerns role assignment and task allocation, and it interfaces with the human partner at the level of abstraction he is most comfortable with. The system is readily available to non-expert users, and programmable with high-level commands in an intuitive interface. Our results demonstrate an overall improvement in terms of completion time, as well as a reduced cognitive load for the human partner.

Transparent role assignment and task allocation in human robot collaboration

Virtual reality (VR)systems let users intuitively interact with 3D environments and have been used extensively for robotic teleoperation tasks. While more immersive than their 2D counterparts, early VR systems were expensive and required specialized hardware. Fortunately, there has been a recent proliferation of consumer-grade VR systems at affordable price points. These systems are inexpensive, relatively portable, and can be integrated into existing robotic frameworks. Our group has designed a VR teleoperation package for the Robot Operating System (ROS), ROS Reality, that can be easily integrated into such frameworks. ROS Reality is an open-source, over-the-Internet teleoperation interface between any ROS-enabled robot and any Unity-compatible VR headset. We completed a pilot study to test the efficacy of our system, with expert human users controlling a Baxter robot via ROS Reality to complete 24 dexterous manipulation tasks, compared to the same users controlling the robot via direct kinesthetic handling. This study provides insight into the feasibility of robotic teleoperation tasks in VR with current consumer-grade resources and exposes issues that need to be addressed in these VR systems. In addition, this paper presents a description of ROS Reality, its components, and architecture. We hope this system will be adopted by other research groups to allow for easy integration of VR teleoperated robots into future experiments.

ROS Reality: A Virtual Reality Framework Using Consumer-Grade Hardware for ROS-Enabled Robots

Efficient motion intent communication is necessary for safe and collaborative work environments with co-located humans and robots. Humans efficiently communicate their motion intent to other humans...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0278364919842925

Communicating and controlling robot arm motion intent through mixed-reality head-mounted displays:

Since its official introduction in 2012, the Robot Web Tools project has grown tremendously as an open-source community, enabling new levels of interoperability and portability across heterogeneous robot systems, devices, and front-end user interfaces. At the heart of Robot Web Tools is the rosbridge protocol as a general means for messaging ROS topics in a client-server paradigm suitable for wide area networks, and human-robot interaction at a global scale through modern web browsers. Building from rosbridge, this paper describes our efforts with Robot Web Tools to advance: 1) human-robot interaction through usable client and visualization libraries for more efficient development of front-end human-robot interfaces, and 2) cloud robotics through more efficient methods of transporting high-bandwidth topics (e.g., kinematic transforms, image streams, and point clouds). We further discuss the significant impact of Robot Web Tools through a diverse set of use cases that showcase the importance of a generic messaging protocol and front-end development systems for human-robot interaction.

Robot Web Tools: Efficient messaging for cloud robotics

This work presents a hierarchical navigation architecture and cascade classifier for sample search and identification on a space exploration rover. A three tier navigation architecture and inverse Jacobian based robot arm controller are presented. The algorithms are implemented on AERO, the Autonomous Exploration Rover, participating in the NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge in 2013 and initial results are demonstrated.

Hierarchical Navigation Architecture and Robotic Arm Controller for a Sample Return Rover

We present a cyber-physical system (CPS) testbed to enable the rapid development, testing, and deployment of assistive robotics technologies in the home of elderly individuals. We built a CPS testbed in a lab environment with initial capabilities allowing for the testing of both individual systems and collections of systems. The CPS testbed has communication, computation, sensing, and control resources available that can be leveraged by individual subsystems within the CPS. We present projects built by different design teams to be integrated in the CPS environment to help the elderly live independent lives and age in place. Finally, we describe a case study for the use of a mobile robot within the CPS to detect and respond in case an elderly person falls at home.

A cyber physical system testbed for assistive robotics technologies in the home

We present the improvements to AERO, the Autonomous Exploration Rover, developed for the 2014 NASA Sample Return Robot competition with the intent of enabling more robust and reliable autonomous operation for sample return rovers. The competition requires the robot to navigate a large outdoor area, find and collect various geologic samples, and return to the starting platform all autonomously and utilizing only space compatible technologies. We highlight improvements made in the implementation and deployment of the vision, navigation, and planning systems. We describe the process of modifying the software to be closer aligned with ROS standard practices, resulting in more predictable and stable operation. We conclude by providing a roadmap for the integration of multiple heterogeneous systems in a shared control framework to enable efficient exploration of large unknown environments.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/7114093/7118873/07119271.pdf

Mitchell Wills

Papers

Robot Web Tools: Efficient messaging for cloud robotics

Hierarchical Navigation Architecture and Robotic Arm Controller for a Sample Return Rover

A cyber physical system testbed for assistive robotics technologies in the home

Realization of vision-based navigation and object recognition algorithms for the sample return challenge