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Model-driven engineering (MDE) addresses central aspects of robotics software development. MDE could enable domain experts to leverage the expressiveness of models, while implementation details on different hardware platforms would be handled by automatic code generation. Today, despite strong MDE efforts in the robotics research community, most evidence points to manual code development being the norm. A possible reason for MDE not being accepted by robot software developers could be the wide range of applications and target platforms, which make all-encompassing MDE IDEs hard to develop and maintain. Therefore, we chose to leverage a large corpus of open-source software widely adopted by the robotics community to extract common structures and gain insight on how and where MDE can support the developers to work more efficiently. We pursue modeling as a complement, rather than imposing MDE as separate solution. Our previous work introduced metamodels to describe components, their interactions, and their resulting composition. In this paper, we present two methods based on metamodels for automated generation of models from manually written artifacts: (1) through static code analysis and (2) by monitoring the execution of a running system. For both methods, we present tools that leverage the potentials of our contributions, with a special focus on their application at runtime to observe and diagnose a real system during its execution. A comprehensive example is provided as a walk-through for robotics software practitioners.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to process automation applications of traditional Information Technologies based on robot software with the ability to capture and interpret the specific processes of organizations. Studies show that RPAs are able to reduce resources and optimize processes effectively in relation to customers. Some of these call center business processes deal with customers most likely to complain; therefore, a “Proactive Notification” robot was developed to classify these types of customers to be prioritized. This robot defines the creation of an RPA architecture for proactive notifications applied to an electric company in Brazil. The methodology used for the development of this project consisted of data management, predictive models, and peripheral components for sending SMS and making calls. It was tested against all customers in 40 cities (two states) and the model considers the historical basis of 3 years of occurrences to predict customers with a high probability of filing a complaint due to power failure. The results show that customers who were called for this type of problem did not call the call center again to complain, suggesting positive acceptance of the robot. In conclusion, the robot presented herein is capable of making proactive notifications with high precision to customers with the highest probability of complaints, predicting possible problems.

At present, various robotics competitions are being held, including the Tsukuba Challenge. The purpose of participating in a robotics competition is to confirm what can be done with the current technology and to demonstrate new research results. Participating teams often use open source software (OSS) for path planning and autonomous navigation. OSS is advantageous in facilitating participation in robotics competitions. However, applying it to a new robot is difficult when a new research does not involve OSS. In addition, robot systems do not consist only of OSS, and the burden of developing and maintaining other systems is significant. To solve the above problems, a software platform that allows for the addition of research achievements of individual robots is desired. With such a platform, research elements that have already been developed can be shared without the need to develop a new system. This makes it easier to maintain and manage the system and increase its sustainability.

The use of autonomous robots in areas that require executing a broad range of different tasks is currently hampered by the high complexity of the software that adapts the robot controller to different situations the robot would face. Current robot software frameworks facilitate implementing controllers for individual tasks with some variability, however, their possibilities for adapting the controllers at runtime are very limited and don’t scale with the requirements of a highly versatile autonomous robot. With the software presented in this paper, the behavior of robots is implemented modularly by composing individual controllers, between which it is possible to switch freely at runtime, since the required transitions are calculated automatically. Thereby the software developer is relieved of the task to manually implement and maintain the transitions between different operational modes of the robot, what largely reduces software complexity for larger amounts of different robot behaviors. The software is realized by a model-based development approach. We will present the metamodels enabling the modeling of the controllers as well as the runtime architecture for the management of the controllers on distributed computation hardware. Furthermore, this paper introduces an algorithm that calculates the transitions between two controllers. A series of technical experiments verifies the choice of the underlying middleware and the performance of online controller reconfiguration. A further experiment demonstrates the applicability of the approach to real robotics applications.

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), related education and teaching activities need to be followed up urgently. Robotics curriculum system and teaching pattern related to AI also need to be innovated and reformed. In this case, we designed the robot software engineering course, which includes robotic core functions: navigation, vision, speech interaction and manipulator operation, etc. To accelerate novice learners to grasp the basic knowledge about AI, we developed the universal robotic platform based on ROS, and apply it to a variety of specific environments and scenarios. To investigate the effect of the proposed education method, we provided opportunities for the novice learners to attend the International RoboCup Competitions, and obtained not only the Champion but also a serial of remarkable achievements.

This chapter describes how the field of collaborative robotics has expanded significantly over the past ten years, such that it is now the fastest growing segment of the global industrial robotics market with advances in robot software technology allowing robots and workers to work “hand-in-hand” to achieve higher levels of efficiency and productivity. This new relationship leverages the strength of the robot to perform dull, dirty and repetitive tasks (e.g., palletizing, painting, packaging, polishing, etc.) whilst combining the higher cognitive abilities and flexibility of the human colleague; a winning combination of brawn and brains that is clearly transforming traditional ways of working. However, this new technological introduction into our workplace will bring forth ethical issues. Sudden, coerced introductions of a robotic colleague into our work space, whom we have long been separated from by means of strategically placed “fencing”, will threaten the adoption of such technology on the plant floor. Evidence presented showed that improper attention to the “human aspects” is believed to be a primary cause of significant failures in the implementation of advanced manufacturing technology in the United States of America. Based on lessons learned in this study, organizations must learn to understand how changes in work tasks or the working environment that are made without consultation with, or involvement of, a worker can significantly impact the human experience and overall productivity.

Robot manipulators are widely used in industries to automate myriad operations. To address the demand shifts in industries, automated systems such as robots must flexibly adapt in response. Such dynamics often necessitate end-users to reprogram robots to meet the changing industry needs. This leads to a demand for experienced programmers, familiar with proprietary robot software. As one alternative, an augmented reality (AR) framework can offer a user-friendly solution that permits end-users to reprogram robots without any domain expertise. This paper presents an AR teaching (ART) methodology that allows end-users to program varied manipulators in an intuitive and effortless manner for tool-path teaching. The ART method is contrasted with an alternative kinesthetic teaching method for its performance and user experience. Results show that the ART method yields a convenient and time-efficient teaching method and it is recommended by users over the kinesthetic teaching method.

As we are witnessing the dawn of the artificial intelligence revolution, it is a good time to discuss the system-architecture challenges of the new age of robotics. Most of the disputes are related to the wide variety of cloud-computing arrangements along the questions of why, with what, and how to exploit existing information technologies to cope effectively with the increasing demands. Traditional industrial robot makers are very conservative, relying exclusively on onboard execution. However, the rising user demand for advanced robot skills, such as dexterous manipulation and free navigation in an unstructured environment, has inspired newcomers to break with tradition and move robot software architecture to the next level. Inspired by the talks of Prof. Imre Rudas on cloud robotics, this article highlights some substantial factors of system design and discusses a real-world industrial example from my RaD practice.

In this paper we discuss the recently added parameterized testing functionalities in the ROSPIT Framework for Physical Integration Testing of robot applications. Physical Integration Testing is a paradigm for end-to-end (hardware-in-the-loop) testing of robot applications. Parameterized testing allows for a test suite to be dynamically reconfigured before execution. A parameterized execution of a test suite can be defined in an episode, and multiple episodes can be gathered in a session. By parameterizing test specifications it becomes easier to reuse and share them. The core test specification format is described using XML Schema, forming a kind of DSL for creating reproducible tests and experiments. By making it easier to create realistic test environments we hope to accelerate robot software engineering and increase the quality of robot software, leading to a greater social contribution of robotics.

Interest in the investigation of novel software and control algorithms for wearable robotics is growing. However, entry into this field requires a significant investment in a testing platform. This work introduces CANopen Robot Controller (CORC)—an open source software stack designed to accelerate the development of robot software and control algorithms—justifying its choice of platform, describing its overall structure, and demonstrating its viability on two distinct platforms.

Assembling robotic multi-agent systems is becoming increasingly attractive due to the emergence of affordable robots. For coordinated missions such fleets usually have to communicate over unreliable channels and still achieve adequate performance. To support system designers in quantifying adequateness, in this paper we present a domain-specific language (DSL) that allows domain-experts to specify (i) quality of service (QoS) requirements of the communication channels; and (ii) QoS capabilities of the involved software components. Such QoS specifications complement the QoS management that has recently been introduced into ROS 2. To fully utilize this approach we have also developed an associated ROS 2 DSL which enables us to verify QoS specifications and provide feedback to the users already at design time. We have evaluated the developed language workbench following the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach which demonstrates that the QoS DSL is complete with respect to ROS 2 and can be easily extended. Additionally, we generate a proof-of-concept implementation for a QoS monitor that can be seamlessly integrated into existing ROS 2 projects.

Modern robot systems use various software programs to autonomously perform different kinds of tasks. However, due to the risks of possible faults and errors, a robotic software program can inevitably crash in some cases, causing that the robot system fails to perform the current task. Thus, for robustness, the crashed program should be correctly recovered to continue the failed task. For this purpose, ROS provides a default restart method to automatically restart crashed programs. However, our case studies of typical ROS programs show that the restart method can perform incorrect crash recovery, and it can even cause the robot to perform dangerous behaviors, because this method loses the program’s important data that was stored before the crash and is used after recovery. To solve this problem, we develop a practical approach named RORY, to perform effective crash recovery of robot software programs in ROS. RORY uses a hybrid checkpoint-replay method, and it is generic to different ROS programs by considering ROS properties. We evaluate RORY on 6 common ROS programs, and show that RORY performs correct crash recovery in both virtual and realistic environments with modest overhead. The comparison experiments indicate that RORY outperforms the restart, checkpoint-alone and replay-alone methods.

In this paper, a new method for offline programming part assembly operations with tight fittings is presented. More specifically, an assembly process trajectory generator with self programming capabilities is developed where the user needs to provide only very sparse and intuitive input. The presented system is added to the existing skill based robot software package VEROSIM. In VEROSIM, the trajectory generator is applied to an industrial test platform for assembling insulin injection devices at the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, where it is shown that the trajectories as expected are executable. Hence, the method is a strong alternative to online approaches such as programming by demonstration.

Researches on robots progresses rapidly in recent years but most available robotics control systems are too heavy and complex to deploying. This paper solves the problem of building a compact software architecture for robotics control. First, we define a set of static and run-time components. Second, design of a light-weight middleware is presented for communication between different components. Finally, a component assembly example is introduced to verify the proposed architecture. Experimental results from a deployed quadruped robot are presented. The result shows the proposed architecture is easy to implement and the proposed architecture can offer reliability for robot software system.

An important prerequisite for the reliability and robustness of a service robot is ensuring the robot's correct behavior when it performs various tasks of interest. Extensive testing is one established approach for ensuring behavioural correctness; this becomes even more important with the integration of learning-based methods into robot software architectures, as there are often no theoretical guarantees about the performance of such methods in varying scenarios. In this paper, we aim towards evaluating the correctness of robot behaviors in tabletop manipulation through automatic generation of simulated test scenarios in which a robot assesses its performance using property-based testing. In particular, key properties of interest for various robot actions are encoded in an action ontology and are then verified and validated within a simulated environment. We evaluate our framework with a Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) which is tested in a Gazebo simulation. We show that our framework can correctly and consistently identify various failed actions in a variety of randomised tabletop manipulation scenarios, in addition to providing deeper insights into the type and location of failures for each designed property., Comment: Accepted for publication at the 10th European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR 2021)

The paradigm of cloud robotics points out a direction for the future development of robots. By deploying robotic applications in the cloud, the workload and cost of local robots are greatly reduced. The rise of microservices and cloud-native technology provides conveniences and guarantees for the development and deployment of cloud applications. This paper proposes a cloud robotic application platform design based on microservices. With the help of Robot Operating System (ROS), we can use the existing rich and diverse robot software packages and deploy them in the cloud without extra modifications. Through the microservices architecture and container technology, robotic applications can be further decoupled in the cloud. That improves the flexibility and compatibility of the platform and embodies the core idea of microservices. In the end, we present a demonstration to cooperate with a simulated robot to complete the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) task, which verifies the feasibility of our design.

This paper summarizes the keynote I gave on the SEAMS 2020 conference. Noting the power of natural evolution that makes living systems extremely adaptive, I describe how artificial evolution can be employed to solve design and optimization problems in software. Thereafter, I discuss the Evolution of Things, that is, the possibility of evolving physical artefacts and zoom in on a (r)evolutionary way of creating 'bodies' and 'brains' of robots for engineering and fundamental research.

Taiwan has implemented the National Twelve-year Basic Education since 2019, and the curriculum focuses on "core literacy", in which independent action, communication and interaction, and social participation echo the educational spirit of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics. Moreover, situated learning is an important topic discussed in the National Twelve-year Basic Education curriculum, which can guide students to experience, practice, deepen their thinking, and improve their vision. It is the key to link learning and application. By building knowledge and training skills in this way, learners' learning motivation and learning effectiveness can be improved. In this study, teenagers are taken as the research object, and the integrated STEAM teaching of robot and program education is constructed by combining the education method of micro: Maqueen robot with a graphic control program, in order to promote the integration and innovative application of robot software and hardware, and provide teenagers with opportunities to contact with robots. The implementation results include the teaching design of program-controlled micro: Maqueen, such as the writing of the graphic control program and its ultrasonic application in micro: Maqueen. The ultrasonic application in micro: Maqueen includes the ultrasonic automatic obstacle avoidance function, ultrasonic distance measurement function, and ultrasonic following function, which aim to cultivate students' logical thinking, problem-solving ability, and other high-level thinking ability, and stimulate students' sustainable development in the field of information technology

In the near future, it will be common that a variety of robots are cooperating to perform a mission in various fields. A key technical challenge to realize this vision is software challenge on how to specify the mission at the user level and how to program each robot separately. In this paper, we propose a novel software development framework that separates mission specification and robot behavior programming. For mission specification, a novel scripting language is proposed with the expression capability of dynamic mode change and multitasking. For robot behavior programming, an extended dataflow model is used for task-level behavior specification that does not depend on the robot hardware platform. In the proposed framework, the actual robot software is automatically generated from the model. The viability of the proposed framework is demonstrated with two real-life experiments.

Programming control systems for mobile robots is complicated and time-consuming, due to three aspects, i.e., the robot behavior coordination, the distributed multi-robot cooperation and the robot software reusability. Subsumption model is a robust control architecture for mobile robots. ALLIANCE model extends it to multirobot systems, which is a fully distributed, fault-tolerant model. Robot operating system (ROS) provides a lot of reusable robot modules. By combining the above three, we propose a software framework named ALLIANCE-ROS for developing fault-tolerant cooperative multi-robot systems with abundant software resources available. We encapsulate the ROS facilities to build the framework prototype. We also use some high-performance plugin-based mechanism to optimize the bottom of the framework. One may use the framework-provided API conveniently to construct single-robot and multi-robot applications with all ROS resources available. This work is demonstrated by three application cases including an autonomous roving robot, a security patrol robot and multiple patrol robots. They are constructed and tested in both the simulated and the real environment. The experimental results validate the usability and availability of ALLIANCE-ROS.

Serial Robots used in Industrial applications such as continuous path welding, painting etc., require the end effector to have motion along a specific path. This paper is an attempt to find joint angles and simulate end effector path along three sample curves. KUKA KR5 Arc Robot software model and Jacobian inverse method is used. Programs are written in MATLAB with the help of Robotics Toolbox plug-in to define sample paths and calculate time stepwise sets of Joint angles while the end effector is desired to move along successive via points of the path. Jacobian and inverse method is used in this program and joint angles are written to a comma separated values file. This file containing the joint angles is input to a KUKA Robot model in RoboAnalyzer software and the end effector path is simulated. It is found in all the three cases that path has reduced deviation with increased step size. We propose that this method may be used to evaluate joint angles for any specific path by any Industrial robot controller on floor in real time applications.

The requirement of the distributed system in optimum resource is creating the new scope of business for the software industry in the area of component based technology with data mining techniques. In optimization of software, the development cost, redesign complexity, resource planning has been growing area of search based software engineering. The reuse of artifacts has been growing over the last decade and the recent works have focus on dynamic reconfiguration of logical component design. However, there are still gaps for identification and reconfigurations of software service component. In this paper, the proposed algorithm gives effective approach for dynamically reconfigurable of the design in real time application with new software service component using clustering techniques. This algorithm is able to handle the large system data set and also applicable for the multiple hierarchy redesign problem. The proposed algorithm compared against similarity score algorithm using a case study of robot path planner class diagram.

This article presents the service robot ROBCO 18 and how it is designed to be cost-oriented. The purpose of ROBCO 18 is to support elderly and disabled, acting as a personal home assistant. The robot will be able effectively to assist people in their homes. The robot is designed to be cost-oriented, using low-cost devices and components. Robot control software has been developed to allow various interfaces and control methods to be used. The robot software system optimizes and distributes data from the robot’s sensors and actuators. In this way, elderly and disabled people are safe in handling the robot and can choose their convenient method of robot control. Finally, we conducted experiments with elderly people to test how the robot is performing different tasks. As a conclusion usability review of the Cost Oriented Tele-Controlled Service Robot for Increasing the Quality of Life of Elderly and Disabled -ROBCO 18 is presented.

Establishing a-priori mission performance guarantees is crucial if autonomous robots are to be used with confidence in missions where failure could incur high costs in life and property damage. Automatic mission software verification, in addition to simulation and experimental benchmarking, is a key component of the solution for establishing performance guarantees. This component requires automatically verifying that the software constructed by the mission designer when executed in a partially known environment will adhere to the performance guarantee. In prior work we developed VIPARS, a unique approach to verifying performance guarantees for autonomous behavior-based robot software based on a combination of static analysis and Bayesian networks. While that approach produced fast and accurate verification of single robot missions with robot motion uncertainty, it did not address multiple-robot missions or any form of uncertainty related to environment geometry. This paper addresses the challenges involved in building a software tool for verifying the behavior of a multi-robot waypoint mission that includes uncertainly located obstacles and uncertain environment geometry as well as uncertainty in robot motion. An approach is presented to the problem of a-priori specification of uncertain environments for robot program verification. Two approaches to modeling probabilistic localization for verification are presented: a high-level approach and an approach that allows run-time localization code to be embedded in verification. Verification and experimental validation results are presented for several autonomous robot missions, demonstrating the accuracy of verification and the mission-specific benefit of localization

Service robots have recently drawn a lot of attention from the public. Integrating with the artificial intelligence of computer science, modern service robots have great potential because they are capable of performing many sophisticated human tasks. In this paper, the service robot named MiABot as receptionist robot is described, it is a mobile robot with autonomous platform being used with a differential drive and controlled by mini PC. The MiABot could sense its surroundings with the aid of various electronic sensors while mechanical actuators were used to move it around. Robot's behaviour was determined by the program, which was loaded to the microcontrollers and PC with Artificial Intelligence. The experiment results demonstrated the feasibility and advantages of this predictive control on the trajectory tracking of a mobile robot. Service robots are designed to assist humans in reception tasks. Robots will interact closely with a group of people in their daily environment. This means that it is essential to create models for natural and intuitive communication between humans and robots.The theoretical basis of artificial intelligence and its application in the field of natural language processing. Besides, robot software architecture is designed and developed. Robot operation modes and implementation are addressed and discussed, they contain information on algorithm for human – robot interacting in natural language, thus a simple approach for generating robot response in arm gesture and emotion. Finally, system evaluation and testing is addressed..

RESUMEN: Actualmente la mayoría de las empresas están inmersas en programas de mejora continua con objeto de incrementar la eficiencia, productividad, calidad y seguridad de los procesos operacionales de la organización, por ejemplo, mediante avances en la digitalización y automatización de todos los eslabones de la cadena de negocio que sean susceptibles de ser sustituidos por robots software. Este trabajo se centra en estudiar, analizar y comparar distintas tecnologías RPA (Robotic Process Automation) para la construcción de robots software. En primer lugar, se describen estas tecnologías de automatización, así como las herramientas open source y comerciales más relevantes para su implementación, incluyendo un análisis comparativo entre UiPath y TagUI en base a sus funcionalidades e idoneidad para una serie de casos de uso. Por último, con la tecnología seleccionada, UiPath, se desarrollan soluciones para dos casos de uso orientados al sector del transporte. En particular, ambos están dirigidos hacia la automatización de las tareas que realiza el auxiliar de transporte como son la recepción de pedidos, asignación de conductores y generación de la carta de porte o CMR y la verificación y carga de archivos de facturación a la base de datos. ABSTRACT: Modern companies are increasingly focussing their efforts on continuous improvement processes in order to boost their efficiency, productivity, quality and security, for example improving the degree of digitalization and automation for all the tasks within the business chain that could be replaced by software robots. The aim of this project is to study, analyse and compare RPA (Robotic Process Automation) technologies for the development of software robots. First, these automation technologies are described, next, the most relevant open source and commercial tools for their implementation are listed, including a comparative analysis between UiPath and TagUI based on their functionalities and suitability for several use cases. The selected technology, UiPath, is then used to develop solutions for two use cases from the logistics sector. Specifically, the goal is the automation of tasks executed by a transport assistant such as the reception of orders, the assignment of drivers, the generation of waybills or CMR, and the verification and upload of billing files to the database. Grado en Ingeniería Informática

Using robots is demanding for supporting our lives and/or covering works that are not suitable for human beings. The robot software implementation requires a variety of knowledge and experiences. Thereby developing cost for such software systems is now increasing. Middleware systems such as Robot Operating System (ROS) are being developed to decrease such cost and widely used. Streaming data Sharing Manager (SSM) is one of such middleware systems that allow developers to write and read sensor data with timestamps using a common PC. This feature enables developers to control a robot by taking account of measured time. This control is important because using multiple sensor data with different timestamp cannot allow developers to control a robot correctly. SSM assumes that only one PC is used to control a robot, therefore if it exists a process that consumes much CPU resource, other processes cannot finish their assumed deadlines, leading to the unexpected behavior of a robot. This paper proposes an architecture called Distributed Streaming data Sharing Manager (DSSM) that enables to distributing each process on existing SSM to different PCs. We investigate the current architecture and behavior of SSM, then propose a new architecture that can achieve our goal. Finally, we apply DSSM to an existing SSM based robot control system that autonomously controls an unmanned vehicle, then confirm the effectiveness of DSSM by measuring the resource usages.

Even if friction modeling and compensation is a very important issue for manipulators, quite simple models are often adopted in the industrial world to avoid too heavy solutions from the computational point of view, and because of the difficulty of finding and identifying a model applicable in any motion condition. This article proposes a general framework for friction identification for industrial manipulators with the goal of solving the previous problems through: first, a complete procedure managing all the steps from data acquisition and model identification up to the generation of the code for the implementation into the robot software architecture, second, the possibility of adopting static or dynamic models of different complexity, and third, the development of some modifications in the dynamic friction model so to achieve a reliable friction torque estimation at any velocity and acceleration regime, avoiding unfeasible peaks and overestimation. The results of experimental tests carried out for different manipulators prove the validity and generality of the proposed friction model and identification procedure.

RESUMEN: Una parte importante dentro de las empresas es la recolección diaria de grandes cantidades de información desde los portales web, como por ejemplo las facturas de los clientes o las reclamaciones que estos puedan poner. Realizar esta tarea manualmente supone un enorme gasto de tiempo y recursos materiales y humanos, que podrían emplearse en otro tipo de labores. Por eso mismo, se han desarrollado técnicas que permiten automatizar, por medio de la creación de robots software, este tipo de tediosos procesos administrativos. De esta forma, se disminuye considerablemente la intervención humana en tareas repetitivas que varían muy poco en cada iteración. Esta reducción contribuye a una mayor fiabilidad y eficiencia del resultado final, a la vez que libera a los encargados de estas labores para que inviertan su atención en otros asuntos que requieran mayor creatividad y toma de decisiones. El objetivo de este Trabajo de Fin de Grado es la creación de uno de estos robots software para la automatización de la recolección diaria de información de una empresa energética en concreto. Para ello, el robot tendrá que navegar por el portal web de la empresa, mediante el uso de tecnología web, filtrando y descargando información de dicha web, para después clasificarla y almacenarla en una base de datos. Para la realización del programa se hará uso del lenguaje de programación C# en el entorno de trabajo Microsoft Visual Studio. Tras finalizar el proyecto y someterlo a diversas pruebas para comprobar su funcionamiento en distintas situaciones, se pudo comprobar como el tiempo invertido en llevar a cabo las descargas diarias disminuye considerablemente mediante la utilización del robot desarrollado. Además, como se puede programar su lanzamiento en horas fuera del horario laboral, el resultado es que ningún equipo ni empleado se verá interrumpido por su ejecución. ABSTRACT: An important part within a company is the daily recollection of large amounts of information throw web portals. An example of that information is all client’s bills or the reclamations they can interpose. To manually do this task means a huge waste of time, material and human resources, which could be used in other kind of jobs. Because of that, some new automatization techniques have been developed, using software robots, in order to automatize these humdrum kinds of processes. In this way, the human intervention in repetitive tasks which are similar in each iteration, decreases notably. This reduction contributes to a bigger reliability and efficiency of the final outcome, while at the same time, it sets free the employers in charge of this labors for doing other issues that require more creativity and decision making. The goal of this final degree project is developing one of those software robots to automatize the daily recollection of information for an energy company in particular. For this reason, the robot will have to surf the company’s web portal, by using web technology, filtering and downloading information that after will be classified and stored in a database. For the program achievement, the programming language C# in the Microsoft Visual Studio environment will be used. After finishing the project and testing it throw various tests in order to check its correct operation in different situations, the fact that the time invested in daily downloads decreases notably using automatization robots, could be verified. Furthermore, it is possible to program the robot’s launching out of working hours, so any computer or employer will be interrupt by its execution. Grado en Ingeniería Informática

This paper is a continuation of our previous paper under the same topic, ToMRobot 1.0. Our main goal of developing ToMRobot 2.0 is to improve the ToMRobot 1.0 that we developed earlier. ToMRobot was developed because we think mobile robot technology is more practical than other approaches as a real world mobility mechanism in MANET testbed. But to develop our own mobile robot at low cost and at the same time not complex is very challenging. The challenge is overcome through the use of easy-to-use components, self-built components using 3D printers and the use of mobile robot designs that have proven to be easily developed, cheap and effective. The use of the Robot Operating System (ROS) as the main robot software framework greatly helps to reduce the complexity of developing control system for mobile robot.

Developing robotics applications is a demanding software engineering challenge. Such a software has to perform multiple cooperating tasks in a well-coordinated manner in order to avoid unsatisfactory behavior. In this paper, we define an approach for developing robot software based on the integration of the programming language X-Klaim and the popular robotics framework ROS. X-Klaim is a programming language specifically devised to design distributed applications consisting of software components interacting through multiple distributed tuple spaces. Advantages of using X-Klaim in the robotics domain derive from its high abstraction level, that allows developers to focus on robots’ behavior, and from its computation and communication model, which is especially suitable for dealing with the distributed nature of robots’ architecture. We show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach by implementing a scenario involving a robot looking for potential victims in a disaster area.

In this paper we report on an architecture for a self-driving car that is based on ROS2. Self-driving cars have to take decisions based on their sensory input in real-time, providing high reliability with a strong demand in functional safety. In principle, self-driving cars are robots. However, typical robot software, in general, and the previous version of the Robot Operating System (ROS), in particular, does not always meet these requirements. With the successor ROS2 the situation has changed and it might be considered as a solution for automated and autonomous driving. Existing robotic software based on ROS was not ready for safety critical applications like self-driving cars. We propose an architecture for using ROS2 for a self-driving car that enables safe and reliable real-time behaviour, but keeping the advantages of ROS such as a distributed architecture and standardised message types. First experiments with an automated real passenger car at lower and higher speed-levels show that our approach seems feasible for autonomous driving under the necessary real-time conditions.