Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Robotics, Cloud Robotics, Service Robotics, Cloud'

This thesis aims to design and develop a platform based on a novel concept - the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) constructed by a robotic platform, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform and cloud computing services. A robotic platform enables hardware abstraction, facilitating the management of input/output between software, mechanical devices  andelectronic systems. The IoT platform is a global network enabling a massive number of devices known as things to communicate with each other and transfer data over the Internet. Cloud computing is a shared pool of scalable hardware usually provisioned as cloud services by third party cloud vendors. The integration of these concepts constitutes the core of the IoRT platform, as a global infrastructure facilitating robots to interconnect over the Internet utilizing common communication technology. Moreover, the pool of cloud resources shared by the connected robots enables scalable storage and processing power. The IoRT platform developed in this study constitutes firstly of the Amazon Web Service (AWS) IoT core serving as the IoT platform. Secondly, it incorporates the Robot Operating system (ROS) as the robotic platform and thirdly the cloud services Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda for data storing and data processing respectively.The platform was evaluated in terms of delays & utilization and visualization capabilities. The platform demonstrates promising result in terms of delays exchanging small packages of data, round-trip delays in order of 50-60ms were obtained between a robot placed in Stockholm and the communication platform AWS IoT placed in Dublin, Ireland. Most of the delay is due to the traveling distance, where a round trip ping between Stockholm and Dublin takes around 50ms. The platforms ability to visualize streaming data from the robots, enables an operator to visualize selected data from any service in the platform over the Internet in near real-time, with round-trip delays in order of 250-300ms where the data propagates through multiple cloud service. In conclusion, this report illustrates the feasibility of merging two major platforms together: ROS and AWS IoT, and moreover, the accessibility to exploit the power and potential enabled by the modern data centers.
Avhandlingens syfte är att utforma och utveckla en plattform baserat på konceptet Internet of Robotic Things konstruerat av en robotikplattform, en Internet of Things plattform och molntjänster. En Internet of Things plattform är ett globalt nätverk som tillåter många enheter att kommunicera med varandra och överföra data över Internet. En robotikplattform underlättar kontrollen av in/ut mellan mjukvara, mekaniska enheter och elektroniska system. Molntjänster är en gemensam pool av skalbar hårdvara som vanligtvis erbjuds av tredje parts molnleverantörer. En Internet of Robotic Things plattform är en global infrastruktur som underlättar avancerade robotar att interagera över Internet genom en gemensam kommunikationsteknik, en pool av molntjänster som delas av alla uppkopplade robotar som tillåter skalbar lagring och processorkraft.Plattformens huvudkomponenter är robotikplattformen Robot Operating System, Internet of Things plattformen AWS IoT Core och molntjänsterna Amazon DynamoDB och AWS Lambda för lagring och databearbetning.Plattformen evalueras i form av plattformegenskaperna, fördröjningar & funktionstid och visualiseringsförmåga. Plattformen visar lovande resultat i from av fördröjningar mellan två robotar som utbyter data med hjälp av IoT plattformen, där fördröjningarna är begränsade av distanssträckan. Plattformens egenskap att visualisera strömmande data från robotar möjliggör för en operatör att visualisera utvald data från plattformen över internet i realtid.

Malgré de nombreuses années de travail en robotique, il existe toujours un manque d’architecture logicielle et de middleware stables pour les systèmes multi-robot. Un intergiciel robotique devrait être conçu pour faire abstraction de l’architecture matérielle de bas niveau, faciliter la communication et l’intégration de nouveaux logiciels. Cette thèse se concentre sur le middleware pour systèmes multi-robot et sur la façon dont nous pouvons améliorer les frameworks existantes dans un contexte multi-robot en ajoutant des services de coordination multi-robot, des outils de développement et de déploiement massif. Nous nous attendons à ce que les robots soient de plus en plus utiles car ils peuvent tirer profit des données provenant d’autres périphériques externes dans leur prise de décision au lieu de simplement réagir à leur environnement local (capteurs, robots coopérant dans une flotte, etc.). Cette thèse évalue d’abord l’un des intergiciels les plus récents pour robot(s) mobile(s), Robot operating system (ROS), suivi par la suite d’un état de l’art sur les middlewares couramment utilisés en robotique. Basé sur les conclusions, nous proposons une contribution originale dans le contexte multi-robots, appelé SDfR (Service discovery for Robots), un mécanisme de découverte des services pour les robots. L’objectif principal est de proposer un mécanisme permettant aux robots de garder une trace des pairs accessibles à l’intérieur d’une flotte tout en utilisant une infrastructure ad-hoc. A cause de la mobilité des robots, les techniques classiques de configuration de réseau pair à pair ne conviennent pas. SDfR est un protocole hautement dynamique, adaptatif et évolutif adapté du protocole SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol). Nous conduisons un ensemble d’expériences, en utilisant une flotte de robots Turtlebot, pour mesurer et montrer que le surdébit de SDfR est limité. La dernière partie de la thèse se concentre sur un modèle de programmation basé sur un automate temporisé. Ce type de programmation a l’avantage d’avoir un modèle qui peut être vérifié et simulé avant de déployer l’application sur de vrais robots. Afin d’enrichir et de faciliter le développement d’applications robotiques, un nouveau modèle de programmation basé sur des automates à états temporisés est proposé, appelé ROSMDB (Robot Operating system Model Driven Behaviour). Il fournit une vérification de modèle lors de la phase de développement et lors de l’exécution. Cette contribution est composée de plusieurs composants : une interface graphique pour créer des modèles basés sur un automate temporisé, un vérificateur de modèle intégré basé sur UPPAAL et un générateur de squelette de code. Enfin, nous avons effectué deux expériences : une avec une flotte de drones Parrot et l’autre avec des Turtlebots afin d’illustre le modèle proposé et sa capacité à vérifier les propriétés
Despite many years of work in robotics, there is still a lack of established software architecture and middleware for multi-robot systems. A robotic middleware should be designed to abstract the low-level hardware architecture, facilitate communication and integration of new software. This PhD thesis is focusing on middleware for multi-robot system and how we can improve existing frameworks for fleet purposes by adding multi-robot coordination services, development and massive deployment tools. We expect robots to be increasingly useful as they can take advantage of data pushed from other external devices in their decision making instead of just reacting to their local environment (sensors, cooperating robots in a fleet, etc). This thesis first evaluates one of the most recent middleware for mobile robot(s), Robot operating system (ROS) and continues with a state of the art about the commonly used middlewares in robotics. Based on the conclusions, we propose an original contribution in the multi-robot context, called SDfR (Service discovery for Robots), a service discovery mechanism for Robots. The main goal is to propose a mechanism that allows highly mobile robots to keep track of the reachable peers inside a fleet while using an ad-hoc infrastructure. Another objective is to propose a network configuration negotiation protocol. Due to the mobility of robots, classical peer to peer network configuration techniques are not suitable. SDfR is a highly dynamic, adaptive and scalable protocol adapted from Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP). We conduced a set of experiments, using a fleet of Turtlebot robots, to measure and show that the overhead of SDfR is limited. The last part of the thesis focuses on programming model based on timed automata. This type of programming has the benefits of having a model that can be verified and simulated before deploying the application on real robots. In order to enrich and facilitate the development of robotic applications, a new programming model based on timed automata state machines is proposed, called ROSMDB (Robot Operating system Model Driven Behaviour). It provides model checking at development phase and at runtime. This contribution is composed of several components: a graphical interface to create models based on timed automata, an integrated model checker based on UPPAAL and a code skeleton generator. Moreover, a ROS specific framework is proposed to verify the correctness of the execution of the models and to trigger alerts. Finally, we conduct two experiments: one with a fleet of Parrot drones and second with Turtlebots in order to illustrates the proposed model and its ability to check properties

Modern day mobile robots are constrained in the resources available to them. Only so much hardware can be fit onto the robotic frame and at the same time they are required to perform tasks that require lots of computational resources, access to massive amounts of data and the ability to share knowledge with other robots around it. This thesis explores the cloud robotics approach in which complex compu- tations can be offloaded to a cloud service which can have a huge amount of computational resources and access to massive data sets. The Robot Operat- ing System, ROS, is extended to allow the robot to communicate with a high powered cluster and this system is used to test our approach on such a complex task as semantic scene understanding. The benefits of the cloud approach is utilized to connect to a cloud based object detection system and to build a cat- egorization system relying on large scale datasets and a parallel computation model. Finally a method is proposed for building a consistent scene description by exploiting semantic relationships between objects.
Moderna mobila robotar har begränsade resurser. Det får inte plats hur mycket hårdvara som helst på roboten och ändå förväntas de utföra arbeten som kräver extremt mycket datorkraft, tillgång till enorm mängd data och samtidigt kommunicera med andra robotar runt omkring sig. Det här examensarbetet utforskar robotik i molnet där komplexa beräk- ningar kan läggas ut i en molntjänst som kan ha tillgång till denna stora mängd datakraft och ha plats för de stora datamängder som behövs. The Ro- bot Operating System, eller ROS, byggs ut för att stödja kommunikation med en molntjänst och det här systemet används sedan för att testa vår lösning på ett så komplext problem som att förstå en omgivning eller miljö på ett seman- tiskt plan. Fördelarna med att använda en molnbaserad lösning används genom att koppla upp sig mot ett objektigenkänningssytem i molnet och för att byg- ga ett objektkategoriseringssystem som förlitar sig på storskaliga datamängder och parallella beräkningsmodeller. Slutligen föreslås en metod för att bygga en tillförlitlig miljöbeskrivning genom att utnyttja semantiska relationer mellan föremål.

The evolution of cloud computing has finally started to affect robotics. Indeed, there have been several real-time cloud applications making their way into robotics as of late. Inherent benefits of cloud robotics include providing virtually infinite computational power and enabling collaboration of a multitude of connected devices. However, its drawbacks include higher latency and overall higher energy consumption. Moreover, local devices in proximity incur higher latency when communicating among themselves via the cloud. At the same time, the cloud is a single point of failure in the network. Fog Computing is an extension of the cloud computing paradigm providing data, compute, storage and application services to end-users on a so-called edge layer. Distinguishing characteristics are its support for mobility and dense geographical distribution. We propose to study the implications of applying fog computing concepts in robotics by developing a middle-ware solution for Robotic Fog Computing Cluster solution for enabling adaptive distributed computation in heterogeneous multi-robot systems interacting with the Internet of Things (IoT). The developed middle-ware has a modular plug-in architecture based on micro-services and facilitates communication of IOT devices with the multi-robot systems. In addition, the developed middle-ware solutions support different load balancing or task allocation algorithms. In particular, we establish that we can enhance the performance of distributed system by decreasing overall system latency by using already established multi-criteria decision-making algorithms like TOPSIS and TODIM with naive Q-learning and with Neural Network based Q-learning.
Master of Science

Traditional methods for Learning from Demonstration require users to train the robot through the entire process, or to provide feedback throughout a given task. These previous methods have proved to be successful in a selection of robotic domains; however, many are limited by the ability of the user to effectively demonstrate the task. In many cases, noisy demonstrations or a failure to understand the underlying model prevent these methods from working with a wider range of non-expert users. My insight is that in many mobile pick-and-place domains, teaching is done at a too fine grained level. In many such tasks, users are solely concerned with the end goal. This implies that the complexity and time associated with training and teaching robots through the entirety of the task is unnecessary. The robotic agent needs to know (1) a probable search location to retrieve the task's objects and (2) how to arrange the items to complete the task. This thesis work develops new techniques for obtaining such data from high-level spatial and temporal observations and demonstrations which can later be applied in new, unseen environments. This thesis makes the following contributions: (1) This work is built on a crowd robotics platform and, as such, we contribute the development of efficient data streaming techniques to further these capabilities. By doing so, users can more easily interact with robots on a number of platforms. (2) The presentation of new algorithms that can learn pick-and-place tasks from a large corpus of goal templates. My work contributes algorithms that produce a metric which ranks the appropriate frame of reference for each item based solely on spatial demonstrations. (3) An algorithm which can enhance the above templates with ordering constraints using coarse and noisy temporal information. Such a method eliminates the need for a user to explicitly specify such constraints and searches for an optimal ordering and placement of items. (4) A novel algorithm which is able to learn probable search locations of objects based solely on sparsely made temporal observations. For this, we introduce persistence models of objects customized to a user's environment.

Le développement de logiciels pour les robots connectés est une difficulté majeure dans le domaine du génie logiciel. Les systèmes proposés sont souvent issus de la fusion de une ou plusieurs plates-formes provenant des robots, des ordinateurs autonomes, des appareils mobiles, des machines virtuelles, des caméras et des réseaux. Nous proposons ici une approche orientée agent permettant de représenter les robots et tous les systèmes auxiliaires comme des agents d’un système. Ce concept de l’agence préserve l’autonomie sur chacun des agents, ce qui est essentiel dans la mise en oeuvre logique d’un nuage d’éléments connectés. Afin de procurer une flexibilité de mise en oeuvre des échanges entre les différentes entités, nous avons mis en place un mécanisme d’hyperactivité ce qui permet de libérer sélectivement une certaine autonomie d’un agent par rapport à ces associés.Actuellement, il n’existe pas de solution orientée méta-modèle pour décrire les ensembles de robots interconnectés. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons un méta-modèle appelé HTM5 pour spécifier a structure, les relations, les échanges, le comportement du système et l’hyperactivité dans un système de nuages de robots. La thèse décrit l’anatomie du méta-modèle (HTM5) en spécifiant les différentes couches indépendantes et en intégrant une plate-forme indépendante de toute plateforme spécifique. Par ailleurs, la thèse décrit également un langage de domaine spécifique pour la modélisation indépendante dans HTM5. Des études de cas concernant la conception et la mise en oeuvre d’un système multi-robots basés sur le modèle développé sont également présentés dans la thèse. Ces études présentent des applications où les décisions commerciales dynamiques sont modélisées à l’aide du modèle HTM5 confirmant ainsi la faisabilité du méta-modèle proposé
Software development for cloud connected robotic systems is a complex software engineeringendeavour. These systems are often an amalgamation of one or more robotic platforms, standalonecomputers, mobile devices, server banks, virtual machines, cameras, network elements and ambientintelligence. An agent oriented approach represents robots and other auxiliary systems as agents inthe system.Software development for distributed and diverse systems like cloud robotic systems require specialsoftware modelling processes and tools. Model driven software development for such complexsystems will increase flexibility, reusability, cost effectiveness and overall quality of the end product.The proposed 5-view meta-model has separate meta-models for specifying structure, relationships,trade, system behaviour and hyperactivity in a cloud robotic system. The thesis describes theanatomy of the 5-view Hyperactive Transaction Meta-Model (HTM5) in computation independent,platform independent and platform specific layers. The thesis also describes a domain specificlanguage for computation independent modelling in HTM5.The thesis has presented a complete meta-model for agent oriented cloud robotic systems and hasseveral simulated and real experiment-projects justifying HTM5 as a feasible meta-model

A software prototype for autonomous 3D scanning of uncooperatively rotating orbital debris using a point cloud sensor is designed and tested. The software successfully generated 3D models under conditions that simulate some on-orbit orbit challenges including relative motion between observer and target, inconsistent target visibility and a target with more than one plane of symmetry. The model scanning software performed well against an irregular object with one plane of symmetry but was weak against objects with 2 planes of symmetry.

The suitability of point cloud sensors and algorithms for space is examined. Terrestrial Graph SLAM is adapted for an uncooperatively rotating orbital debris scanning scenario. A joint EKF attitude estimate and shape similiarity loop closure heuristic for orbital debris is derived and experimentally tested. The binary Extended Fast Point Feature Histogram (EFPFH) is defined and analyzed as a binary quantization of the floating point EFPFH. Both the binary and floating point EPFH are experimentally tested and compared as part of the joint loop closure heuristic.

Several automatic methods exist for creating 3D point clouds extracted from 2D photos. In manycases, the result is a sparse point cloud, unevenly distributed over the scene.After determining the coordinates of the same point in two images of an object, the 3D positionof that point can be calculated using knowledge of camera data and relative orientation. A model created from a unevenly distributed point clouds may loss detail and precision in thesparse areas. The aim of this thesis is to study methods for densification of point clouds. This thesis contains a literature study over different methods for extracting matched point pairs,and an implementation of Least Square Template Matching (LSTM) with a set of improvementtechniques. The implementation is evaluated on a set of different scenes of various difficulty. LSTM is implemented by working on a dense grid of points in an image and Wallis filtering isused to enhance contrast. The matched point correspondences are evaluated with parameters fromthe optimization in order to keep good matches and discard bad ones. The purpose is to find detailsclose to a plane in the images, or on plane-like surfaces. A set of extensions to LSTM is implemented in the aim of improving the quality of the matchedpoints. The seed points are improved by Transformed Normalized Cross Correlation (TNCC) andMultiple Seed Points (MSP) for the same template, and then tested to see if they converge to thesame result. Wallis filtering is used to increase the contrast in the image. The quality of the extractedpoints are evaluated with respect to correlation with other optimization parameters and comparisonof standard deviation in x- and y- direction. If a point is rejected, the option to try again with a largertemplate size exists, called Adaptive Template Size (ATS).

Det här mastersprojektet syftar till att ansluta industriroboten till moln plattformen och utvärdera anslutning och säkerhet. För att uppnå bättre anslutning, säkerhet och integration, föreslås en modifierad Moln Tillverkningssystem- (CRS) arkitektur, som kännetecknas av hög modularitet, standardisering och komposibilitet. Arkitekturens specifika applikationer iprivata, offentliga och hybridmoln diskuteras också. Sedan är en  systemarkitektur med detaljerad mjukvarukomposition designad för Molnrobotik. Enligt den föreslagna systemarkitekturen presenteras möjliga säkerhetshotskällor och motsvarande lösningar.Under projektet används Universell Robot 5 (UR5) som en praktisk robotinstans för att utveckla en kommunikationsrutin mellan KTH Moln och robotar. Ett applikationsprogramgränssnitt (API) skrivet i Python for Universell Robot och servern är etablerad. API: n består av två modulära delar, Gateway Agenten och Applikationsmjukvaran.Gateway Agenten realiserar kopplingen mellan Universell Robot 5 (UR5) och molnet, medan applikationsmjukvaran kan anpassas till specifika tillämpningar och krav. I detta projekt utvecklas tre huvudfunktioner i applikationsmjukvaran, inklusive datainsamling, datavisualisering och fjärrkontroll. Förutom att utvärdera anslutning och stabilitet simulerasdet privata robotik molnsystemet och det offentliga robotik molnsystemet med KTH Moln.Hybrid robotik moln systemet diskuteras också. Genom resultaten av fallstudier verifieras anslutningen och integrationen av Moln Tillverkningssystem.
This master thesis project aims to connect the industrial robot to the Cloud platform, and evaluate the connectivity and security. To realize better connectivity, security and integration, a modified Cloud Manufacturing System (CRS) architecture is proposed, which is characterized by high modularity, standardization and composability. The architecture’s specific applications in private, public and hybrid cloud are discussed as well. Then, one system architecture with detailed software composition is designed for Cloud Robotics.According to the proposed system architecture, possible security threat sources and corresponding solutions are presented.During the project, Universal Robot 5 (UR5) is utilized as a practical robot instance to develop a communication routine between KTH Cloud and robots. An Application Program Interface (API) written by Python for Universal Robots and the server is established. The API consists of two modularized part, Gateway Agent and Application Package. The Gateway Agent realizes the connection between the Universal Robot 5 (UR5) and the cloud, while theApplication Package can be customized according to specific application and requirements. In this project, three main functions are developed in the Application Package, including data acquisition, data visualization and remote control. Besides, to evaluate connectivity and stability, private robotics cloud system and public robotics cloud system are simulated with KTH Cloud. The hybrid robotics cloud system is discussed as well. Through the results of case studies, the connectivity and integration of Cloud Manufacturing System are verified.

Semantic segmentation is a key approach to comprehensive image data analysis. It can be applied to analyze 2D images, videos, and even point clouds that contain 3D data points. On the first two problems, CNNs have achieved remarkable progress, but on point cloud segmentation, the results are less satisfactory due to challenges such as limited memory resource and difficulties in 3D point annotation. One of the research studies carried out by the Computer Vision Lab at Linköping University was aiming to ease the semantic segmentation of 3D point cloud. The idea is that by first projecting 3D data points to 2D space and then focusing only on the analysis of 2D images, we can reduce the overall workload for the segmentation process as well as exploit the existing well-developed 2D semantic segmentation techniques. In order to improve the performance of CNNs for 2D semantic segmentation, the study has used input data derived from different modalities. However, how different modalities can be optimally fused is still an open question. Based on the above-mentioned study, this thesis aims to improve the multistream framework architecture. More concretely, we investigate how different singlestream architectures impact the multistream framework with a given fusion method, and how different fusion methods contribute to the overall performance of a given multistream framework. As a result, our proposed fusion architecture outperformed all the investigated traditional fusion methods. Along with the best singlestream candidate and few additional training techniques, our final proposed multistream framework obtained a relative gain of 7.3\% mIoU compared to the baseline on the semantic3D point cloud test set, increasing the ranking from 12th to 5th position on the benchmark leaderboard.

This research work presents a novel Cognitive Task Planning framework for Smart Industrial Robots. The framework makes an industrial mobile manipulator robot Cognitive by applying Semantic Web Technologies. It also introduces a novel Navigation Among Movable Obstacles algorithm for robots navigating and manipulating inside a firm. The objective of Industrie 4.0 is the creation of Smart Factories: modular firms provided with cyber-physical systems able to strong customize products under the condition of highly flexible mass-production. Such systems should real-time communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans via the Internet of Things. They should intelligently adapt to the changing surroundings and autonomously navigate inside a firm while moving obstacles that occlude free paths, even if seen for the first time. At the end, in order to accomplish all these tasks while being efficient, they should learn from their actions and from that of other agents. Most of existing industrial mobile robots navigate along pre-generated trajectories. They follow ectrified wires embedded in the ground or lines painted on th efloor. When there is no expectation of environment changes and cycle times are critical, this planning is functional. When workspaces and tasks change frequently, it is better to plan dynamically: robots should autonomously navigate without relying on modifications of their environments. Consider the human behavior: humans reason about the environment and consider the possibility of moving obstacles if a certain goal cannot be reached or if moving objects may significantly shorten the path to it. This problem is named Navigation Among Movable Obstacles and is mostly known in rescue robotics. This work transposes the problem on an industrial scenario and tries to deal with its two challenges: the high dimensionality of the state space and the treatment of uncertainty. The proposed NAMO algorithm aims to focus exploration on less explored areas. For this reason it extends the Kinodynamic Motion Planning by Interior-Exterior Cell Exploration algorithm. The extension does not impose obstacles avoidance: it assigns an importance to each cell by combining the efforts necessary to reach it and that needed to free it from obstacles. The obtained algorithm is scalable because of its independence from the size of the map and from the number, shape, and pose of obstacles. It does not impose restrictions on actions to be performed: the robot can both push and grasp every object. Currently, the algorithm assumes full world knowledge but the environment is reconfigurable and the algorithm can be easily extended in order to solve NAMO problems in unknown environments. The algorithm handles sensor feedbacks and corrects uncertainties. Usually Robotics separates Motion Planning and Manipulation problems. NAMO forces their combined processing by introducing the need of manipulating multiple objects, often unknown, while navigating. Adopting standard precomputed grasps is not sufficient to deal with the big amount of existing different objects. A Semantic Knowledge Framework is proposed in support of the proposed algorithm by giving robots the ability to learn to manipulate objects and disseminate the information gained during the fulfillment of tasks. The Framework is composed by an Ontology and an Engine. The Ontology extends the IEEE Standard Ontologies for Robotics and Automation and contains descriptions of learned manipulation tasks and detected objects. It is accessible from any robot connected to the Cloud. It can be considered a data store for the efficient and reliable execution of repetitive tasks; and a Web-based repository for the exchange of information between robots and for the speed up of the learning phase. No other manipulation ontology exists respecting the IEEE Standard and, regardless the standard, the proposed ontology differs from the existing ones because of the type of features saved and the efficient way in which they can be accessed: through a super fast Cascade Hashing algorithm. The Engine lets compute and store the manipulation actions when not present in the Ontology. It is based on Reinforcement Learning techniques that avoid massive trainings on large-scale databases and favors human-robot interactions. The overall system is flexible and easily adaptable to different robots operating in different industrial environments. It is characterized by a modular structure where each software block is completely reusable. Every block is based on the open-source Robot Operating System. Not all industrial robot controllers are designed to be ROS-compliant. This thesis presents the method adopted during this research in order to Open Industrial Robot Controllers and create a ROS-Industrial interface for them.
Questa ricerca presenta una nuova struttura di Pianificazione Cognitiva delle Attività ideata per Robot Industriali Intelligenti. La struttura rende Cognitivo un manipolatore industriale mobile applicando le tecnologie offerte dal Web Semantico. Viene inoltre introdotto un nuovo algoritmo di Navigazione tra Oggetti Removibili per robot che navigano e manipolano all’interno di una fabbrica. L’obiettivo di Industria 4.0 è quello di creare Fabbriche Intelligenti: fabbriche modulari dotate di sistemi cyber-fisici in grado di customizzare i prodotti pur mantenendo una produzione di massa altamente flessibile. Tali sistemi devono essere in grado di comunicare e cooperare tra loro e con gli agenti umani in tempo reale, attraverso l’Internet delle Cose. Devono sapersi autonomamente ed intelligentemente adattare ai costanti cambiamenti dell’ambiente che li circonda. Devono saper navigare autonomamente all’interno della fabbrica, anche spostando ostacoli che occludono percorsi liberi, ed essere in grado di manipolare questi oggetti anche se visti per la prima volta. Devono essere in grado di imparare dalle loro azioni e da quelle eseguite da altri agenti. La maggior parte dei robot industriali mobili naviga secondo traiettorie generate a priori. Seguono filielettrificatiincorporatinelterrenoolineedipintesulpavimento. Pianificareapriorièfunzionale se l’ambiente è immutevole e i cicli produttivi sono caratterizzati da criticità temporali. E’ preferibile adottare una pianificazione dinamica se, invece, l’area di lavoro ed i compiti assegnati cambiano frequentemente: i robot devono saper navigare autonomamente senza tener conto dei cambiamenti circostanti. Si consideri il comportamento umano: l’uomo ragiona sulla possibilità di spostare ostacolise unaposizione obiettivo nonè raggiungibileose talespostamento puòaccorciare la traiettoria da percorrere. Questo problema viene detto Navigazione tra Oggetti Removibili ed è noto alla robotica di soccorso. Questo lavoro traspone il problema in uno scenario industriale e prova ad affrontare i suoi due obiettivi principali: l’elevata dimensione dello spazio di ricerca ed il trattamento dell’incertezza. L’algoritmo proposto vuole dare priorità di esplorazione alle aree meno esplorate, per questo estende l’algoritmo noto come Kinodynamic Motion Planning by Interior-Exterior Cell Exploration. L’estensione non impone l’elusione degli ostacoli. Assegna ad ogni cella un’importanza che combina lo sforzo necessario per raggiungerla con quello necessario per liberarla da eventuali ostacoli. L’algoritmo risultante è scalabile grazie alla sua indipendenza dalla dimensione della mappa e dal numero, forma e posizione degli ostacoli. Non impone restrizioni sulle azioni da eseguire: ogni oggetto può venir spinto o afferrato. Allo stato attuale, l’algoritmo assume una completa conoscenza del mondo circonstante. L’ambiente è però riconfigurabile di modo che l’algoritmo possa venir facilmente esteso alla risoluzione di problemi di Navigazione tra Oggetti Removibili in ambienti ignoti. L’algoritmo gestisce i feedback dati dai sensori per correggere le incertezze. Solitamente la Robotica separa la risoluzione dei problemi di pianificazione del movimento da quelli di manipolazione. La Navigazione tra Ostacoli Removibili forza il loro trattamento combinato introducendo la necessità di manipolare oggetti diversi, spesso ignoti, durante la navigazione. Adottare prese pre calcolate non fa fronte alla grande quantità e diversità di oggetti esistenti. Questa tesi propone un Framework di Conoscenza Semantica a supporto dell’algoritmo sopra esposto. Essodàairobotlacapacitàdiimparareamanipolareoggettiedisseminareleinformazioni acquisite durante il compimento dei compiti assegnati. Il Framework si compone di un’Ontologia e di un Engine. L’Ontologia estende lo Standard IEEE formulato per Ontologie per la Robotica e l’Automazione andando a definire le manipolazioni apprese e gli oggetti rilevati. È accessibile a qualsiasi robot connesso al Cloud. Può venir considerato I) una raccolta di dati per l’esecuzione efficiente ed affidabile di azioni ripetute; II) un archivio Web per lo scambio di informazioni tra robot e la velocizzazione della fase di apprendimento. Ad ora, non esistono altre ontologie sulla manipolazione che rispettino lo Standard IEEE. Indipendentemente dallo standard, l’Ontologia propostadifferiscedaquelleesistentiperiltipodiinformazionisalvateeperilmodoefficienteincui un agente può accedere a queste informazioni: attraverso un algoritmo di Cascade Hashing molto veloce. L’Engine consente il calcolo e il salvataggio delle manipolazioni non ancora in Ontologia. Si basa su tecniche di Reinforcement Learning che evitano il training massivo su basi di dati a larga scala, favorendo l’interazione uomo-robot. Infatti, viene data ai robot la possibilità di imparare dagli umani attraverso un framework di Apprendimento Robotico da Dimostrazioni. Il sistema finale è flessibile ed adattabile a robot diversi operanti in diversi ambienti industriali. È caratterizzato da una struttura modulare in cui ogni blocco è completamente riutilizzabile. Ogni blocco si basa sul sistema open-source denominato Robot Operating System. Non tutti i controllori industriali sono disegnati per essere compatibili con questa piattaforma. Viene quindi presentato il metodo che è stato adottato per aprire i controllori dei robot industriali e crearne un’interfaccia ROS.

This thesis is about the intelligent compression of large 3D point cloud datasets. The non-parametric method that we describe simultaneously generates a continuous representation of the workspace surfaces from discrete laser samples and decimates the dataset, retaining only locally salient samples. Our framework attains decimation factors in excess of two orders of magnitude without significant degradation in fidelity. The work presented here has a specific focus on gathering and processing laser measurements taken from a moving platform in outdoor workspaces. We introduce a somewhat unusual parameterisation of the problem and look to Gaussian Processes as the fundamental machinery in our processing pipeline. Our system compresses laser data in a fashion that is naturally sympathetic to the underlying structure and complexity of the workspace. In geometrically complex areas, compression is lower than that in geometrically bland areas. We focus on this property in detail and it leads us well beyond a simple application of non-parametric techniques. Indeed, towards the end of the thesis we develop a non-stationary GP framework whereby our regression model adapts to the local workspace complexity. Throughout we construct our algorithms so that they may be efficiently implemented. In addition, we present a detailed analysis of the proposed system and investigate model parameters, metric errors and data compression rates. Finally, we note that this work is predicated on a substantial amount of robotics engineering which has allowed us to produce a high quality, peer reviewed, dataset - the first of its kind.

Precision agriculture is a management strategy of agricultural activities based on data-driven decisions. This enables smarter usage of the available resources (e.g., water and crop) and ensures higher productivity. Following the integration of precision farming with the internet of things, big data, and artificial intelligence, we are witnessing the rise of ``Agriculture 5.0”. In this context, WeLASER is a European project that aims to create a system for managing weeding tasks by the adoption of robots equipped with laser technology that recognizes and burns weeds; this prevents the usage of chemical pesticides that can cause environmental damages. Such application involves the joint usage of robotic agents and data from IoT devices (e.g., weather stations) to perform effective weeding tasks. The goal of this thesis is to design, create, and test a data platform that enables the interoperability of IoT devices and robotic agents as well as data-intensive analytics on streaming data. Such data platform provides unified interfaces to collect, integrate, and analyze real-time data as well as to manage historical data.

Manufacturing, under the umbrella of the latest industrial revolution, has gone through enormous changes in the last decades to then later evolve in what we know now as smart manufacturing. Different companies and entities have developed their own versions of architectures for intelligentand digitalized manufacturing systems. Ideating a exible and safe architecture is one of the first steps towards a system that intends to be applicable in different environments, regardless of the vast variety of possibilities available. For this purpose, the following thesis presents an investigation on the state-of-the-art solutions of the most recent digitalized cloud-based system architectures in the domain of discreet manufacturing. Based on an initial system architecture conceived from the company ABB, an evaluation of this architecture was conducted, by taking in consideration the existing systematical approaches to the digitalization of this industry. In the following thesis work, we investigate, describe and evaluate the limitations and strengths of the most recent and known architectural approaches to cloud robotics. Finally, a few key remarks are made towards ABB's initial solution but also to the industry in general.
PADME

The use of virtual reality in engineering tasks, such as in virtual commissioning, has increased steadily in recent years, where a robot, machine or object of interest can be simulated and visualized. Yet, for a more immerse experience, an environment for the object in question needs to be constructed. However, the process for creatingan accurate environment, for a virtual simulation have remained a costly and a long endeavour. Because of this, many digital simulations are performed, either with no environment at all, or present a very basic and abstract representation of an intended environment.The aim of this thesis is to investigate if technologies such as LiDAR and digital photogrammetry could shorten the environment creation process. Therefore, a demonstrative virtual environment was created and analysed, in which the different technologies was investigated and presented in the form of a comprehensive review of the current state of the technologies with in digital recreation. Lastly, a technique specific evaluation of the time requirement, cost and user difficulty was conducted. As the field of LiDAR and digital photogrammetry is too vast to investigate all forms thereof within one project, this thesis is limited to the investigation of static laser scanners and wide lens camera photogrammetry. A semi industrious locale was chosen for digital replication, which through static laser scans and photographs would generate semi-automated 3D models.The resulting 3D models leave much to be desired, as large holes were present throughout the 3D models, sincecertain surfaces are not suitable for neither replication processes. Transparent and reflective surfaces lead to ripple effects within the 3D models geometry and textures. Moreover, certain surfaces, as blank areas for photogrammetry or black coloration for laser scanners led to missing features and model distortions.Yet despite the abnormalities, the majority of the test environment was successfully re-created. An evaluation of the created environments was performed, which list and illustrate with tables and figures the attributes, strengths and weaknesses of each technique. Moreover, technique specific limitations and a spatial analysis was carried out. With the result, seemingly illustrating that photogrammetry creates more visually accurate 3D models in comparison to the laser scanner, yet the laser scanner produces a more spatially accurate result. As such, a selective combination of the techniques can be suggested.Observations and interviews seem to point towards the full scale application, in which an accurate 3D model is re-created without much effort, to currently not exist. As both photogrammetry and static laser scanning require great effort, skill and time in order to create a seemingly perfect solid model. Yet, utilizing either, or both techniques as a template for 3D object creation could reduce the time to create an environment significantly.Furthermore, methods such as digital 3D sculpting could be used in order to remove imperfections and create what is missing from the digitally constructed 3D models. Thereby achieving an accurate result.

This work's aim is movement detection in the environment of a robot, that may move itself. A 2D occupancy grid representation is used, containing only the currently visible environment, without filtering in time. Motion detection is based on a grid-based particle filter introduced by Tanzmeister et al. in Grid-based Mapping and Tracking in Dynamic Environments using a Uniform Evidential Environment Representation. The system was implemented in the Robot Operating System, which allows for re-use of modules which the solution is composed of. The KITTI Visual Odometry dataset was chosen as a source~of LiDAR data for experiments, along with ground-truth pose information. Ground segmentation based on Loopy Belief Propagation was used to filter the point clouds. The implemeted motion detector is able to distiguish between static and dynamic vehicles in this dataset. Further tests in a simulated environment have shown some shortcomings in the detection of large continuous moving objects.

This thesis provides a comparison between instance segmentation methods using point clouds and depth images. Specifically, their performance on cluttered scenes of irregular objects in an industrial environment is investigated. Recent work by Wang et al. [1] has suggested potential benefits of a point cloud representation when performing deep learning on data from 3D cameras. However, little work has been done to enable quantifiable comparisons between methods based on different representations, particularly on industrial data. Generating synthetic data provides accurate grayscale, depth map, and point cloud representations for a large number of scenes and can thus be used to compare methods regardless of datatype. The datasets in this work are created using a tool provided by SICK. They simulate postal packages on a conveyor belt scanned by a LiDAR, closely resembling a common industry application. Two datasets are generated. One dataset has low complexity, containing only boxes.The other has higher complexity, containing a combination of boxes and multiple types of irregularly shaped parcels. State-of-the-art instance segmentation methods are selected based on their performance on existing benchmarks. We chose PointGroup by Jiang et al. [2], which uses point clouds, and Mask R-CNN by He et al. [3], which uses images. The results support that there may be benefits of using a point cloud representation over depth images. PointGroup performs better in terms of the chosen metric on both datasets. On low complexity scenes, the inference times are similar between the two methods tested. However, on higher complexity scenes, MaskR-CNN is significantly faster.

One fundamental task in robotics is random bin-picking, where it is important to be able to detect an object in a bin and estimate its pose to plan the motion of a robotic arm. For this purpose, this thesis work aimed to investigate and evaluate algorithms for 6D pose estimation when the object was given by a CAD model. The scene was given by a point cloud illustrating a partial 3D view of the bin with multiple instances of the object. Two algorithms were thus implemented and evaluated. The first algorithm was an approach based on Point Pair Features, and the second was Fast Global Registration. For evaluation, four different CAD models were used to create synthetic data with ground truth annotations. It was concluded that the Point Pair Feature approach provided a robust localization of objects and can be used for bin-picking. The algorithm appears to be able to handle different types of objects, however, with small limitations when the object has flat surfaces and weak texture or many similar details. The disadvantage with the algorithm was the execution time. Fast Global Registration, on the other hand, did not provide a robust localization of objects and is thus not a good solution for bin-picking.

Traditional forest management relies on a small field sample and interpretation of aerial photography that not only are costly to execute but also yield inaccurate estimates of the entire forest in question. Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a remote sensing technology that records point clouds representing the 3D structure of a forest canopy and the terrain underneath. We present a method for segmenting individual trees from the LiDAR point clouds without making prior assumptions about tree crown shapes and sizes. We then present a method that vertically stratifies the point cloud to an overstory and multiple understory tree canopy layers. Using the stratification method, we modeled the occlusion of higher canopy layers with respect to point density. We also present a distributed computing approach that enables processing the massive data of an arbitrarily large forest. Lastly, we investigated using deep learning for coniferous/deciduous classification of point cloud segments representing individual tree crowns. We applied the developed methods to the University of Kentucky Robinson Forest, a natural, majorly deciduous, closed-canopy forest. 90% of overstory and 47% of understory trees were detected with false positive rates of 14% and 2% respectively. Vertical stratification improved the detection rate of understory trees to 67% at the cost of increasing their false positive rate to 12%. According to our occlusion model, a point density of about 170 pt/m² is needed to segment understory trees located in the third layer as accurately as overstory trees. Using our distributed processing method, we segmented about two million trees within a 7400-ha forest in 2.5 hours using 192 processing cores, showing a speedup of ~170. Our deep learning experiments showed high classification accuracies (~82% coniferous and ~90% deciduous) without the need to manually assemble the features. In conclusion, the methods developed are steps forward to remote, accurate quantification of large natural forests at the individual tree level.

Die Kartierung und Lokalisierung eines mobilen Roboters in seiner Umgebung ist eine wichtige Voraussetzung für dessen Autonomie. In dieser Arbeit wird der Einsatz eines 3D-Laserscanners zur Erfüllung dieser Aufgaben untersucht. Durch die optimierte Anordnung eines rotierenden 2D-Laserscanners werden hochauflösende Bereiche vorgegeben. Zudem wird mit Hilfe von ICP die Kartierung und Lokalisierung im Stillstand durchgeführt. Bei der Betrachtung zur Verbesserung der Bewegungsschätzung wird auch eine Möglichkeit zur Lokalisierung während der Bewegung mit 3D-Scans vorgestellt. Die vorgestellten Algorithmen werden durch Experimente mit realer Hardware evaluiert.

For safe and reliable driving, it is essential that an autonomous vehicle can accurately perceive the surrounding environment. Modern sensor technologies used for perception, such as LiDAR and RADAR, deliver a large set of 3D measurement points known as a point cloud. There is a huge need to interpret the point cloud data to detect other road users, such as vehicles and pedestrians. Many research studies have proposed image-based models for 2D object detection. This thesis takes it a step further and aims to develop a LiDAR-based 3D object detection model that operates in real-time, with emphasis on autonomous driving scenarios. We propose 3D YOLO, an extension of YOLO (You Only Look Once), which is one of the fastest state-of-the-art 2D object detectors for images. The proposed model takes point cloud data as input and outputs 3D bounding boxes with class scores in real-time. Most of the existing 3D object detectors use hand-crafted features, while our model follows the end-to-end learning fashion, which removes manual feature engineering. 3D YOLO pipeline consists of two networks: (a) Feature Learning Network, an artificial neural network that transforms the input point cloud to a new feature space; (b) 3DNet, a novel convolutional neural network architecture based on YOLO that learns the shape description of the objects. Our experiments on the KITTI dataset shows that the 3D YOLO has high accuracy and outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR-based models in efficiency. This makes it a suitable candidate for deployment in autonomous vehicles.
För att autonoma fordon ska ha en god uppfattning av sin omgivning används moderna sensorer som LiDAR och RADAR. Dessa genererar en stor mängd 3-dimensionella datapunkter som kallas point clouds. Inom utvecklingen av autonoma fordon finns det ett stort behov av att tolka LiDAR-data samt klassificera medtrafikanter. Ett stort antal studier har gjorts om 2D-objektdetektering som analyserar bilder för att upptäcka fordon, men vi är intresserade av 3D-objektdetektering med hjälp av endast LiDAR data. Därför introducerar vi modellen 3D YOLO, som bygger på YOLO (You Only Look Once), som är en av de snabbaste state-of-the-art modellerna inom 2D-objektdetektering för bilder. 3D YOLO tar in ett point cloud och producerar 3D lådor som markerar de olika objekten samt anger objektets kategori. Vi har tränat och evaluerat modellen med den publika träningsdatan KITTI. Våra resultat visar att 3D YOLO är snabbare än dagens state-of-the-art LiDAR-baserade modeller med en hög träffsäkerhet. Detta gör den till en god kandidat för kunna användas av autonoma fordon.

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors have many different application areas, from revealing archaeological structures to aiding navigation of vehicles. However, it is challenging to interpret and fully use the vast amount of unstructured data that LiDARs collect. Automatic classification of LiDAR data would ease the utilization, whether it is for examining structures or aiding vehicles. In recent years, there have been many advances in deep learning for semantic segmentation of automotive LiDAR data, but there is less research on aerial LiDAR data. This thesis investigates the current state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, and how well they perform on LiDAR data acquired by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). It also investigates different training techniques for class imbalanced and limited datasets, which are common challenges for semantic segmentation networks. Lastly, this thesis investigates if pre-training can improve the performance of the models. The LiDAR scans were first projected to range images and then a fully convolutional semantic segmentation network was used. Three different training techniques were evaluated: weighted sampling, data augmentation, and grouping of classes. No improvement was observed by the weighted sampling, neither did grouping of classes have a substantial effect on the performance. Pre-training on the large public dataset SemanticKITTI resulted in a small performance improvement, but the data augmentation seemed to have the largest positive impact. The mIoU of the best model, which was trained with data augmentation, was 63.7% and it performed very well on the classes Ground, Vegetation, and Vehicle. The other classes in the UAV dataset, Person and Structure, had very little data and were challenging for most models to classify correctly. In general, the models trained on UAV data performed similarly as the state-of-the-art models trained on automotive data.

The geometrical structure of a tree can consist of thousands, even millions, of branches, twigs and leaves in complex arrangements. The structure contains a lot of useful information and can be used for example to assess a tree's health or calculate parameters such as total wood volume or branch size distribution. Because of the complexity, capturing the structure of an entire tree used to be nearly impossible, but the increased availability and quality of particularly digital cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) instruments is making it increasingly possible. A set of digital images of a tree, or a point cloud of a tree from a LIDAR scan, contains a lot of data, but the information about the tree structure has to be extracted from this data through analysis. This work presents a method of reconstructing 3D models of trees from point clouds. The model is constructed from cylindrical segments which are added one by one. Bayesian inference is used to determine how to optimize the parameters of model segment candidates and whether or not to accept them as part of the model. A Hough transform for finding cylinders in point clouds is presented, and used as a heuristic to guide the proposals of model segment candidates. Previous related works have mainly focused on high density point clouds of sparse trees, whereas the objective of this work was to analyze low resolution point clouds of dense almond trees. The method is evaluated on artificial and real datasets and works rather well on high quality data, but performs poorly on low resolution data with gaps and occlusions.

In questa tesi viene eseguita una ricerca applicativa sull'implementazione di un robot collaborativo, con lo scopo di sgravare gli operatori da mansioni ripetitive e impiegare il loro tempo per migliorare la qualità della produzione e dei prodotti finali. Dopo una parte introduttiva dedicata alla descrizione dei punti salienti dell’Industria 4.0 e alle scelte che il mercato propone riguardo ai robot collaborativi, si è preso in considerazione il caso specifico di ASA San Marino: l’analisi del processo produttivo del reparto presse ha posto la lente di ingrandimento sulle mansioni che il singolo operatore è chiamato a svolgere. Le problematiche evidenziate non riguardavano tutto il reparto ma solo un gruppo di 6 macchine che operano su più turni e costantemente. Per risolvere le problematiche si è ipotizzata un’implementazione robotica di tipo collaborativa, che potesse garantire l’interazione tra uomo e macchina, che non invadesse il layout di reparto con gabbie di recinzione e che, soprattutto, fosse di facile e veloce installazione. Partendo dall'esperienza maturata durante il percorso di tirocinio in ambito di programmazione del cobot, l’obiettivo della tesi è arrivare all'installazione effettiva del cobot al termine del processo di produzione della pressa, utilizzandolo per pallettizzare i prodotti in maniera automatica, collaborando con l’operatore nel raggiungimento dell’obiettivo comune. Per ottenere ciò si è dunque passati prima per un’analisi delle caratteristiche del cobot, inquadrando le sue esigenze e definendo i suoi limiti, poi risolvendo i vari problemi sorti e implementando il sistema per far svolgere le mansioni al robot senza l’aiuto di altri macchinari che richiedessero modifiche del layout.

In this thesis project, an underwater 3D scanner based on structured light has been constructed and developed. Two other scanners, based on stereoscopy and a line-swept laser, were also tested. The target application is to examine objects inside the water filled reactor vessel of nuclear power plants. Structured light systems (SLS) use a projector to illuminate the surface of the scanned object, and a camera to capture the surfaces' reflection. By projecting a series of specific line-patterns, the pixel columns of the digital projector can be identified off the scanned surface. 3D points can then be triangulated using ray-plane intersection. These points form the basis the final 3D model. To construct an accurate 3D model of the scanned surface, both the projector and the camera need to be calibrated. In the implemented 3D scanner, this was done using the Camera Calibration Toolbox for Matlab. The codebase of this scanner comes from the Matlab implementation by Lanman & Taubin at Brown University. The code has been modified and extended to meet the needs of this project. An examination of the effects of the underwater environment has been performed, both theoretically and experimentally. The performance of the scanner has been analyzed, and different 3D model visualization methods have been tested. In the constructed scanner, a small pico projector was used together with a high pixel count DSLR camera. Because these are both consumer level products, the cost of this system is just a fraction of commercial counterparts, which uses professional components. Yet, thanks to the use of a high pixel count camera, the measurement resolution of the scanner is comparable to the high-end of industrial structured light scanners.

This work is concerned by the issue of calibrating a robotic workplace, including the localization of a calibration object for the purpose of calibrating a 2D or 3D camera, a robotic arm and a scene of robotic workplace. At first, the problems related to the calibration of the aforementioned elements were studied. Further, an analysis of suitable methods for performing these calibrations was performed. The result of this work is application of ROS robotic system providing methods for three different types of calibration programs, whose functionality is experimentally verified at the end of this work.

Currently manufacturers in the European Surface Mount Technology (SMT) industry seeproduction changeover, machine downtime and process optimization as their biggestchallenges. They also see a need for collecting data and sharing information betweenmachines, people and systems involved in the manufacturing process. Internet of Things (IoT)technology provides an opportunity to make this happen. This research project gives answers tothe question of what the potentials and challenges of IoT implementation are in European SMTmanufacturing. First, key IoT concepts are introduced. Then, through interviews with expertsworking in SMT manufacturing, the current standpoint of the SMT industry is defined. The studypinpoints obstacles in SMT IoT implementation and proposes a solution. Firstly, local datacollection and sharing needs to be achieved through the use of standardized IoT protocols andAPIs. Secondly, because SMT manufacturers do not trust that sensitive data will remain securein the Cloud, a separation of proprietary data and statistical data is needed in order take a stepfurther and collect Big Data in a Cloud service. This will allow for new services to be offered byequipment manufacturers.
I dagsläget upplever tillverkare inom den europeiska ytmonteringsindustrin för elektronikproduktionsomställningar, nedtid för maskiner och processoptimering som sina störstautmaningar. De ser även ett behov av att samla data och dela information mellan maskiner,människor och system som som är delaktiga i tillverkningsprocessen.Sakernas internet, även kallat Internet of Things (IoT), erbjuder teknik som kan göra dettamöjligt. Det här forskningsprojektet besvarar frågan om vilken potential som finns samt vilkautmaningar en implementation av sakernas internet inom europeisk ytmonteringstillverkning avelektronik innebär. Till att börja med introduceras nyckelkoncept inom sakernas internet. Sedandefinieras utgångsläget i elektroniktillverkningsindustrin genom intervjuer med experter.Studien belyser de hinder som ligger i vägen för implementation och föreslår en lösning. Dettainnebär först och främst att datainsamling och delning av data måste uppnås genomanvändning av standardiserade protokoll för sakernas internet ochapplikationsprogrammeringsgränssnitt (APIer). På grund av att elektroniktillverkare inte litar påatt känslig data förblir säker i molnet måste proprietär data separeras från statistisk data. Dettaför att möjliggöra nästa steg som är insamling av så kallad Big Data i en molntjänst. Dettamöjliggör i sin tur för tillverkaren av produktionsmaskiner att erbjuda nya tjänster.

A Computação em Nuvem é uma mudança de paradigma que tem ganho força ao longo dos últimos anos, sendo suportada pelo aumento da disponibilidade, omnipresença e fiabilidade das ligações sem fios à Internet. A Computação em Nuvem permite o acesso a recursos computacionais aparentemente ilimitados e localizados num agrupamento de computadores externos (a Nuvem). Em contrapartida, alguns robôs, como por exemplo drones, têm requisitos de mobilidade, tais como um tamanho/peso máximo ou uma autonomia mínima, e transportar mais recursos computacionais a bordo significa prejudicar estes requisitos. Este princípio pode ser importado para o campo de Robótica, dando origem ao nome Robótica em Nuvem. Neste caso, o objetivo é permitir que robôs consigam executar tarefas que não seriam capazes de executar em circunstâncias normais e/ou libertar recursos computacionais a bordo, de modo a que mais tarefas ou tarefas mais complexas possam ser executadas ao mesmo tempo por um robô móvel. Há muitas tarefas robóticas que podem tirar proveito de poder de processamento massivo e armazenamento, tais como mapeamento e localização simultâneos (SLAM), navegação, processamento de imagem, interação humanorobô e aprendizagem. Todas estas tarefas podem esgotar rapidamente os recursos computacionais de um robô, especialmente se algumas delas forem executadas simultâneamente. No entanto, para estabelecer uma ligação e exportar dados para a Nuvem é necessária alguma largura de banda, tornando assim o sistema num compromisso: por um lado, são libertados carga computacional e espaço de armazenamento, por outro lado é colocada maior pressão sobre o uso da rede sem fios. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo analisar este compromisso, adaptando duas tarefas multi-robô existentes, que operam sobre o Robot Operating System (ROS), e comparar a abordagem baseada em Nuvem com o sistema tradicional. Para validar as capacidades dos sistemas robóticos baseados na nuvem, foram realizadas tanto simulações como experiências com robôs reais. Os resultados de simulação mostram um claro ganho no tempo de CPU, enquanto que os testes com robôs reais confirmam que os resultados das tarefas permanecem inalterados. Apesar dos sistemas baseados na Nuvem exigirem muito maior largura de banda, um moderno Wi-Fi router consegue fornecer o suficiente para suportar qualquer equipa realista de robôs. Palavras-chave: Computação em Nuvem, Robótica em Nuvem, Tecnologia Sem Fios, ROS, Recursos Computacionais, Largura de Banda.
Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift in computation that has been gaining traction over the recent years, which is supported by the increasing availability and ubiquity of a reliable wireless connection to the Internet. Cloud Computing enables the access to seemingly unlimited computer resources that are located on an external computer cluster (the Cloud). In contrast, some robots, e.g. drones, have mobility requirements such as maximum size/weight or minimum autonomy, and carrying more onboard computer resources usually means hindering these requirements. This principle can be brought to the field of Robotics hence the name Cloud Robotics. In this case, the goal is to allow robots to perform tasks they would not be able to under normal circumstances and/or to free onboard resources so that more tasks or more complex tasks can be executed at the same time by a mobile robot. There are many existing robotic tasks that can take advantage of massive processing power and storage, such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), navigation and trajectory planning, image processing, pattern recognition, human-robot interaction and machine learning to name a few. All of these can quickly drain the robot out of its computer resources, especially if some of these tasks are running at the same time. However, in order to access and export data to the Cloud some bandwidth is needed, thus making the system a tradeoff: on the one hand, computation load and storage space is being freed, while on the other hand more strain is being put on the wireless network usage. As wireless connection protocols become more and more powerful, a Cloud-based solution becomes more interesting. This dissertation aims to analyse this tradeoff by adapting two existing multi-robot tasks, working on the Robotic Operating System (ROS), and compare the Cloud-based approach to the traditional one. To validate the capabilities of Cloud-based robotic systems, both simulations and experiments with real robots were conducted. Simulation results show a clear gain in CPU time, while the latter confirms the outcome of the tasks remains the same. Despite the Cloudbased systems, requiring considerably more bandwidth, a modern off-the-shelf Wi-Fi router can provide with enough to support any realistic team of robots. Keywords: Cloud Computing, Cloud Robotics, Wireless Technology, ROS, Computer Resources, Bandwidth.

The emergence of cloud computing has transformed the potential of robotics by enabling multi-robotic teams to fulfil complex tasks in the cloud. This paradigm is known as “cloud robotics” and relieves robots from hardware and software limitations, as large amounts of available resources and parallel computing capabilities are available in the cloud. The introduction of cloud-enabled robots alleviates the need for computationally intensive robots to be built, as many, if not all, of the CPU-intensive tasks can be offloaded into the cloud, resulting in multi-robots that require much less power, energy consumption and on-board processing units. While the benefits of cloud robotics are clearly evident and have resulted in an increase in interest among the scientific community, one of the biggest challenges of cloud robotics is the inherent communication challenges brought about by disconnections between the multi-robotic system and the cloud. The communication delays brought about by the cloud disconnection results in robots not being able to receive and transmit data to the physical cloud. The unavailability of these robotic services in certain instances could prove fatal in a heterogeneous environment that requires multi-robotic teams to assist with the saving of human lives. This niche area is relatively unexplored in the literature. This work serves to assist with the challenge of disconnection in cloud robotics by proposing a survivable cloud multi-robotics (SCMR) framework for heterogeneous environments. The SCMR framework leverages the combination of a virtual ad hoc network formed by the robot-to-robot communication and a physical cloud infrastructure formed by the robot-to-cloud communications. The Quality of Service (QoS) on the SCMR framework is tested and validated by determining the optimal energy utilization and Time of Response (ToR) on drivability analysis with and without cloud connection. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is feasible for current multi-robotic applications and shows the survivability aspect of the framework in instances of cloud disconnection.
School of Computing
M.Sc. (Computer Science)

碩士
國立高雄應用科技大學
資訊管理系
100
Currently, many industries during the product development will process experiment in a laboratory. It usually causes dangers to operators. Therefore many schools don’t let students to do the real experiment in order to avoid the dangerous situations. Besides, establish a laboratory must needs huge investments, like money, space. Some schools located in a remote area even can’t afford to pay such huge investments. For the past few years, there are many researches using idea of remote laboratory to solve above problems. Operator can do an experiment at remote laboratory through internet, but those researcher’s system architecture use one-to-one to connect. In other words, user must remember the remote laboratory’s IP address before connect to remote laboratory. It’s hard to work in our real world, cause if there are ten remote laboratories; user needs to remember ten IP address. And past researches didn’t record during an experiment, it wastes resources. Therefore we use the idea of remote laboratory, and combine cloud services platform to be our control center. Operator can know where the laboratories are through connect to this control center. And our system will record during an experiment, student can watch the video to learn how to do an experiment.

As the capabilities of autonomous vehicles increase, their use in situations that are dangerous or dull for humans is becoming more popular. Autonomous systems are currently being used in several military and civilian domains, including search and rescue operations, disaster relief coordination, infrastructure inspection and surveillance missions. In order to perform high level mission autonomy tasks, a method is required for the vehicle to localize itself, as well as generate a map of the environment. Algorithms which allow the vehicle to concurrently localize and create a map of its surroundings are known as solutions to the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem. Certain high level tasks, such as drivability analysis and obstacle avoidance, benefit from the use of a dense map of the environment, and are typically generated with the use of point cloud data. The point cloud data is incorporated into SLAM algorithms with scan registration techniques, which determine the relative transformation between two sufficiently overlapping point clouds. The Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) algorithm is a promising method for scan registration, however many issues with the NDT approach exist, including a poor convergence basin, discontinuities in the NDT cost function, and unreliable pose estimation in sparse, outdoor environments. This thesis presents methods to overcome the shortcomings of the NDT algorithm, in both 2D and 3D scenarios. To improve the convergence basin of NDT for 2D scan registration, the Multi-Scale k-Means NDT (MSKM-NDT) algorithm is presented, which divides a 2D point cloud using k-means clustering and performs the scan registration optimization over multiple scales of clustering. The k-means clustering approach generates fewer Gaussian distributions when compared to the standard NDT algorithm, allowing for evaluation of the cost function across all Gaussian clusters. Cost evaluation across all the clusters guarantees that the optimization will converge, as it resolves the issue of discontinuities in the cost function found in the standard NDT algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that the MSKM-NDT approach can be used to register partially overlapping scans with large initial transformation error, and that the convergence basin of MSKM-NDT is superior to NDT for the same test data. As k-means clustering does not scale well to 3D, the Segmented Greedy Cluster NDT (SGC-NDT) method is proposed as an alternative approach to improve and guarantee convergence using 3D point clouds that contain points corresponding to the ground of the environment. The SGC-NDT algorithm segments the ground points using a Gaussian Process (GP) regression model and performs clustering of the non ground points using a greedy method. The greedy clustering extracts natural features in the environment and generates Gaussian clusters to be used within the NDT framework for scan registration. Segmentation of the ground plane and generation of the Gaussian distributions using natural features results in fewer Gaussian distributions when compared to the standard NDT algorithm. Similar to MSKM-NDT, the cost function can be evaluated across all the clusters in the scan, resulting in a smooth and continuous cost function that guarantees convergence of the optimization. Experiments demonstrate that the SGC-NDT algorithm results in scan registrations with higher accuracy and better convergence properties than other state-of-the-art methods for both urban and forested environments.

abstract: Tolerances on line profiles are used to control cross-sectional shapes of parts, such as turbine blades. A full life cycle for many mechanical devices depends (i) on a wise assignment of tolerances during design and (ii) on careful quality control of the manufacturing process to ensure adherence to the specified tolerances. This thesis describes a new method for quality control of a manufacturing process by improving the method used to convert measured points on a part to a geometric entity that can be compared directly with tolerance specifications. The focus of this paper is the development of a new computational method for obtaining the least-squares fit of a set of points that have been measured with a coordinate measurement machine along a line-profile. The pseudo-inverse of a rectangular matrix is used to convert the measured points to the least-squares fit of the profile. Numerical examples are included for convex and concave line-profiles, that are formed from line- and circular arc-segments.
Dissertation/Thesis
M.S. Mechanical Engineering 2013

博士
國立臺灣科技大學
電機工程系
100
This thesis first proposes an approach of local visual homing for multi-waypoint robot homing in piecewise linear routes and reduces the navigation time by developing a fast robot homing approach. For a robot with fixed specification, the proposed fast robot homing approach aims to speed up navigation without compromising navigation accuracy. Compared to prior work on local visual homing with SIFT feature matching, the average distance between consecutive waypoints can be lengthened and the robot is allowed to depart at a higher speed from each waypoint. To improve the tolerance to scale differences in a purely SIFT-based approach, log-polar transform is used to find a circular correspondence. A faster but less accurate motion is designed when images are registered by log-polar transform in the beginning of the visual homing. After the robot is relatively close to a targeted waypoint, the more accurate approach of local visual homing is adopted to maintain the navigation accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that not only faster navigation with competitive navigation accuracy can be achieved, but also fewer waypoints are required in order to guide the robot back to its homing place. Besides the fast robot homing approach which is based on a topological map, this thesis also proposes a vision-based metric localization system with cloud computing for indoor environments. Compared to other vision-based localization researches which find the most similar database image to a query image from database images which are captured along a trajectory by using visual vocabulary or general SIFT feature matching approach, the proposed system can find the location of the query image when the query image largely differs in the viewing angle with the closest database image by matching ASIFT features in the query image with the SIFT features in the database images. Two heavy computation processes, the ASIFT feature detection in the query image and the image registration between the query image and database images, are calculated in Hadoop MapReduce computation framework in order to speed up the response to a request of localization service. Experiments not only demonstrate the performance and feasibility of the proposed localization system but also show higher localization correct rate by using the proposed approach than visual vocabulary and general SIFT feature matching approach when the environment is modeled by limited number of database images.

M.Sc. (Computer Science)
General machine intelligence represents the principal ambition of artificial intelligence research: creating machines that readily adapt to their environment. Machine learning represents the driving force of adaptation in artificial intelligence. However, two pertinent dilemmas emerge from research into machine learning. Firstly, how do intelligent agents learn effectively in real-world environments, in which randomness, perceptual aliasing and dynamics complicate learning algorithms? Secondly, how can intelligent agents exchange knowledge and learn from one another without introducing mathematical anomalies that might impede on the effectiveness of the applied learning algorithms? In a robotic search and rescue scenario, for example, the control system of each robot must learn from its surroundings in a fast-changing and unpredictable environment while at the same time sharing its learned information with others. In well-understood problems, an intelligent agent that is capable of solving task-specific problems will suffice. The challenge behind complex environments comes from fact that agents must solve arbitrary problems (Kaelbling et al. 1996; Ryan 2008). General problem-solving abilities are hence necessary for intelligent agents in complex environments, such as robotic applications. Although specialized machine learning techniques and cognitive hierarchical planning and learning may be a suitable solution for general problem-solving, such techniques have not been extensively explored in the context of cooperative multi-agent learning. In particular, to the knowledge of the author, no cognitive architecture has been designed which can support knowledge-sharing or self-organisation in cooperative multi-agent learning systems. It is therefore social learning in real-world applications that forms the basis of the research presented in this dissertation. This research aims to develop a distributed cognitive architecture for cooperative multi-agent learning in complex environments. The proposed Multi-agent Learning through Distributed Adaptive Contextualization Distributed Cognitive Architecture for Multi-agent Learning (MALDAC) Architecture comprises a self-organising multi-agent system to address the communication constraints that the physical hardware imposes on the system. The individual agents of the system implement their own cognitive learning architecture. The proposed Context-based Adaptive Empathy-deliberation Agent (CAEDA) Architecture investigates the applicability of emotion, ‘consciousness’, embodiment and sociability in cognitive architecture design. Cloud computing is proposed as a method of service delivery for the learning system, in which the MALDAC Architecture governs multiple CAEDA-based agents. An implementation of the proposed architecture is applied to a simulated multi-robot system to best emulate real-world complexities. Analyses indicate favourable results for the cooperative learning capabilities of the proposed MALDAC and CAEDA architectures.

Die Kartierung und Lokalisierung eines mobilen Roboters in seiner Umgebung ist eine wichtige Voraussetzung für dessen Autonomie. In dieser Arbeit wird der Einsatz eines 3D-Laserscanners zur Erfüllung dieser Aufgaben untersucht. Durch die optimierte Anordnung eines rotierenden 2D-Laserscanners werden hochauflösende Bereiche vorgegeben. Zudem wird mit Hilfe von ICP die Kartierung und Lokalisierung im Stillstand durchgeführt. Bei der Betrachtung zur Verbesserung der Bewegungsschätzung wird auch eine Möglichkeit zur Lokalisierung während der Bewegung mit 3D-Scans vorgestellt. Die vorgestellten Algorithmen werden durch Experimente mit realer Hardware evaluiert.

There is a growing demand for indoor farm management systems that can track plant growth, allow automatic control and aid in real-time decision making. Internet of Thing (IoT)-based solutions are being applied to meet these needs and numerous researchers have created prototypes for meeting specific needs using sensors, algorithms, and automations. However, limited studies are available that report on comprehensive large-scale experiments to test various aspects related to availability, scalability and reliability of sensors and actuators used in low-cost indoor farms. The purpose of this study was to develop a low-cost, IoT devices driven indoor farm as a testbed for growing microgreens and other experimental crops. The testbed was designed using off-the-shelf sensors and actuators for conducting research experiments, addressing identified challenges, and utilizing remotely acquired data for developing an intelligent farm management system. The sensors were used for collecting and monitoring electrical conductivity (EC), pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) levels of the nutrient solution, light intensity, environmental variables, and imagery data. The control of light emitting diodes (LEDs), irrigation pumps, and camera modules was carried out using commercially available components. All the sensors and actuators were remotely monitored, controlled, and coordinated using a cloud-based dashboard, Raspberry Pis, and Arduino microcontrollers. To implement a reliable, real-time control of actuators, edge computing was used as it helped in minimizing latency and identifying anomalies.

Decision making about overall system performance and harvesting schedule was accomplished by providing alerts on anomalies in the sensors and actuators and through installation of cameras to predict yield of microgreens, respectively. A split-plot statistical design was used to evaluate the effect of lighting, nutrition solution concentration, seed density, and day of harvest on the growth of microgreens. This study complements and expands past efforts by other researchers on building a low cost IoT-based indoor farm. While the experience with the testbed demonstrates its real-world potential of conducting experimental research, some major lessons were learnt along the way that could be used for future enhancements.