Integration of a simulation platform for electrical mobility within the arrowhead interoperability framework

This dissertation document deals with the development of a project, over a span of more than two years, carried out within the scope of the Arrowhead Framework and which bears my personal contribution in several sections. The final part of the project took place during a visiting period at the university of Luleå. The Arrowhead Project is an European project, belonging to the ARTEMIS association, which aims to foster new technologies and unify the access to them into an unique framework. Such technologies include the Internet of Things phe- nomenon, Smart Houses, Electrical Mobility and renewable energy production. An application is considered compliant with such framework when it respects the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm and it is able to interact with a set of defined components called Arrowhead Core Services. My personal contribution to this project is given by the development of several user-friendly API, published in the project's main repository, and the integration of a legacy system within the Arrowhead Framework. The implementation of this legacy system was initiated by me in 2012 and, after many improvements carried out by several developers in UniBO, it has been again significantly modified this year in order to achieve compatibility. The system consists of a simulation of an urban scenario where a certain amount of electrical vehicles are traveling along their specified routes. The vehicles are con-suming their battery and, thus, need to recharge at the charging stations. The electrical vehicles need to use a reservation mechanism to be able to recharge and avoid waiting lines, due to the long recharge process. The integration with the above mentioned framework consists in the publication of the services that the system provides to the end users through the instantiation of several Arrowhead Service Producers, together with a demo Arrowhead- compliant client application able to consume such services.

Integration of ROS for the control of industrial robotic systems in a proprietary environment

The paper deals with the integration of ROS, in the proprietary environment of the Marchesini Group company, for the control of industrial robotic systems. The basic tools of this open-source software are deeply studied to model a full proprietary Pick and Place manipulator inside it, and to develop custom ROS nodes to calculate trajectories; speaking of which, the URDF format is the standard to represent robots in ROS and the motion planning framework MoveIt offers user-friendly high-level methods. The communication between ROS and the Marchesini control architecture is established using the OPC UA standard; the tasks computed are transmitted offline to the PLC, supervisor controller of the physical robot, because the performances of the protocol don’t allow any kind of active control by ROS. Once the data are completely stored at the Marchesini side, the industrial PC makes the real robot execute a trajectory computed by MoveIt, so that it replicates the behaviour of the simulated manipulator in Rviz. Multiple experiments are performed to evaluate in detail the potential of ROS in the planning of movements for the company proprietary robots. The project ends with a small study regarding the use of ROS as a simulation platform. First, it is necessary to understand how a robotic application of the company can be reproduced in the Gazebo real world simulator. Then, a ROS node extracts information and examines the simulated robot behaviour, through the subscription to specific topics.