TORP: An open standard framework for humanoid robots

Humanoid robots are an extremely complex interdisciplinary research field. Particularly, the development of high size humanoid robots usually requires joint efforts and skills from groups that are in many different research centers around the world. However, there are serious constraints in this kind of collaborative development. Some efforts have been made in order to propose new software frameworks that can allow distributed development with also some degree of hardware abstraction, allowing software reuse in successive projects. However, computation represents only one of the dimensions in robotics tasks, and the need for reuse and exchange of full robot modules between groups are growing. Large advances could be reached if physical parts of a robot could be reused in a different robot constructed with other technologies by other researcher or group. This paper proposes a new robot framework, from now on called TORP (The Open Robot Project), that aims to provide a standard architecture in all dimensions (electrical, mechanical and computational) for this collaborative development. This methodology also represents an open project that is fully shared. In this paper, the first robot constructed following the TORP specification set is presented as well as the advances proposed for its improvement. © 2010 IEEE.

A multi-objective programming approach for the optimal operation of distributed generation considering uncertainty

Due to the renewed interest in distributed generation (DG), the number of DG units incorporated in distribution systems has been rapidly increasing in the past few years. This situation requires new analysis tools for understanding system performance, and taking advantage of the potential benefits of DG. This paper presents an evolutionary multi-objective programming approach to determine the optimal operation of DG in distribution systems. The objectives are the minimization of the system power losses and operation cost of the DG units. The proposed approach also considers the inherent stochasticity of DG technologies powered by renewable resources. Some tests were carried out on the IEEE 34 bus distribution test system showing the robustness and applicability of the proposed methodology. © 2011 IEEE.

Hierarchy-Based Access Control in Distributed Environments

Access control is a fundamental concern in any system that manages resources, e.g., operating systems, file systems, databases and communications systems. The problem we address is how to specify, enforce, and implement access control in distributed environments. This problem occurs in many applications such as management of distributed project resources, e-newspaper and payTV subscription services. Starting from an access relation between users and resources, we derive a user hierarchy, a resource hierarchy, and a unified hierarchy. The unified hierarchy is then used to specify the access relation in a way that is compact and that allows efficient queries. It is also used in cryptographic schemes that enforce the access relation. We introduce three specific cryptography based hierarchical schemes, which can effectively enforce and implement access control and are designed for distributed environments because they do not need the presence of a central authority (except perhaps for set- UP).

CoolBOT: a component-oriented programming framework for robotics

[EN] Programming software for controlling robotic systems in order to built working systems that perform adequately according to their design requirements remains being a task that requires an important development effort. Currently, there are no clear programming paradigms for programming robotic systems, and the programming techniques which are of common use today are not adequate to deal with the complexity associated with these systems. The work presented in this document describes a programming tool, concretely a framework, that must be considered as a first step to devise a tool for dealing with the complexity present in robotics systems. In this framework the software that controls a system is viewed as a dynamic network of units of execution inter-connected by means of data paths. Each one of these units of execution, called a component, is a port automaton which provides a given functionality, hidden behind an external interface specifying clearly which data it needs and which data it produces. Components, once defined and built, may be instantiated, integrated and used as many times as needed in other systems. The framework provides the infrastructure necessary to support this concept for components and the inter communication between them by means of data paths (port connections) which can be established and de-established dynamically. Moreover, and considering that the more robust components that conform a system are, the more robust the system is, the framework provides the necessary infrastructure to control and monitor the components than integrate a system at any given instant of time.

Diseño, implementación y verificación de un controlador para robots educativos

[EN] This project briefly analyzes the scope and applications of Industrial Robotics, as well as the importance that this technical discipline has gained in the past decades. In addition, it proposes a modern platform to assist in teaching this discipline in colleges and universities. This new educational platform for the teaching of Industrial Robotics is based on the robotic systems from Rhino Robotics Ltd., using the existing robotic arms and replacing the control electronics by a newer, modern and yet backwards-compatible controller. In addition to the controller, this platform also provides new, up-to-date software utilities that are more intuitive than those provided with the old system. The work to be done consists essentially in receiving commands from a personal computer which the controller must interpret in order to control the motors of the robotic arm. The controller itself will be implemented as an embedded system based on microcontrollers. This requires the implementation of a communication protocol between the personal computer and the microcontroller, the design of a command interpreter, the design of the electronics for motor control using PWM and H-bridges, and the implementation of control techniques (more precisely, PID control). Hence, this project combines software and hardware design and integration techniques with motor control techniques and feedback control methods from Control Engineering, along with the kinematic analysis of the Rhino XR-4 robotic arm. 

Engineering Agent-Oriented Technologies and Programming Languages for Computer Programming and Software Development

Mainstream hardware is becoming parallel, heterogeneous, and distributed on every desk, every home and in every pocket. As a consequence, in the last years software is having an epochal turn toward concurrency, distribution, interaction which is pushed by the evolution of hardware architectures and the growing of network availability. This calls for introducing further abstraction layers on top of those provided by classical mainstream programming paradigms, to tackle more effectively the new complexities that developers have to face in everyday programming. A convergence it is recognizable in the mainstream toward the adoption of the actor paradigm as a mean to unite object-oriented programming and concurrency. Nevertheless, we argue that the actor paradigm can only be considered a good starting point to provide a more comprehensive response to such a fundamental and radical change in software development. Accordingly, the main objective of this thesis is to propose Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) as a high-level general purpose programming paradigm, natural evolution of actors and objects, introducing a further level of human-inspired concepts for programming software systems, meant to simplify the design and programming of concurrent, distributed, reactive/interactive programs. To this end, in the dissertation first we construct the required background by studying the state-of-the-art of both actor-oriented and agent-oriented programming, and then we focus on the engineering of integrated programming technologies for developing agent-based systems in their classical application domains: artificial intelligence and distributed artificial intelligence. Then, we shift the perspective moving from the development of intelligent software systems, toward general purpose software development. Using the expertise maturated during the phase of background construction, we introduce a general-purpose programming language named simpAL, which founds its roots on general principles and practices of software development, and at the same time provides an agent-oriented level of abstraction for the engineering of general purpose software systems.

A novel paradigm for patient-cooperative control of upper-limb rehabilitation robots

Early intervention and intensive therapy improve the outcome of neuromuscular rehabilitation. There are indications that where a patient is motivated and premeditates their movement, the recovery is more effective. Therefore, a strategy for patient-cooperative control of rehabilitation devices for upper extremities is proposed and evaluated. The strategy is based on the minimal intervention principle allowing an efficient exploitation of task space redundancies and resulting in user-driven movement trajectories. The patient's effort is taken into consideration by enabling the machine to comply with forces exerted by the user. The interaction is enhanced through a multimodal display and a virtually generated environment that includes haptic, visual and sound modalities.

Some techniques for automated, resource-aware distributed and mobile computing in a multi-paradigm programming system

Distributed parallel execution systems speed up applications by splitting tasks into processes whose execution is assigned to different receiving nodes in a high-bandwidth network. On the distributing side, a fundamental problem is grouping and scheduling such tasks such that each one involves sufñcient computational cost when compared to the task creation and communication costs and other such practical overheads. On the receiving side, an important issue is to have some assurance of the correctness and characteristics of the code received and also of the kind of load the particular task is going to pose, which can be specified by means of certificates. In this paper we present in a tutorial way a number of general solutions to these problems, and illustrate them through their implementation in the Ciao multi-paradigm language and program development environment. This system includes facilities for parallel and distributed execution, an assertion language for specifying complex programs properties (including safety and resource-related properties), and compile-time and run-time tools for performing automated parallelization and resource control, as well as certification of programs with resource consumption assurances and efñcient checking of such certificates.

Distributed bees algorithm for task allocation in swarm of robots

In this paper, we propose the distributed bees algorithm (DBA) for task allocation in a swarm of robots. In the proposed scenario, task allocation consists in assigning the robots to the found targets in a 2-D arena. The expected distribution is obtained from the targets' qualities that are represented as scalar values. Decision-making mechanism is distributed and robots autonomously choose their assignments taking into account targets' qualities and distances. We tested the scalability of the proposed DBA algorithm in terms of number of robots and number of targets. For that, the experiments were performed in the simulator for various sets of parameters, including number of robots, number of targets, and targets' utilities. Control parameters inherent to DBA were tuned to test how they affect the final robot distribution. The simulation results show that by increasing the robot swarm size, the distribution error decreased.

A distributed end-to-end overload control mechanism for networks of SIP servers.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control protocol standardized by the IETF for creating, modifying and terminating multimedia sessions. With the increasing use of SIP in large deployments, the current SIP design cannot handle overload effectively, which may cause SIP networks to suffer from congestion collapse under heavy offered load. This paper introduces a distributed end-to-end overload control (DEOC) mechanism, which is deployed at the edge servers of SIP networks and is easy to implement. By applying overload control closest to the source of traf?c, DEOC can keep high throughput for SIP networks even when the offered load exceeds the capacity of the network. Besides, it responds quickly to the sudden variations of the offered load and achieves good fairness. Theoretic analysis and extensive simulations verify that DEOC is effective in controlling overload of SIP networks.

A platform for real-time control education with LEGO MINDSTORMS.

A set of software development tools for building real-time control systems on a simple robotics platform is described in the paper. The tools are being used in a real-time systems course as a basis for student projects. The development platform is a low-cost PC running GNU/Linux, and the target system is LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, thus keeping the cost of the laboratory low. Real-time control software is developed using a mixed paradigm. Functional code for control algorithms is automatically generated in C from Simulink models. This code is then integrated into a concurrent, real-time software architecture based on a set of components written in Ada. This approach enables the students to take advantage of the high-level, model-oriented features that Simulink oers for designing control algorithms, and the comprehensive support for concurrency and real-time constructs provided by Ada.

A proposal for enhancing the motivation in students of computer programming

Computer programming is known to be one of the most difficult courses for students in the first year of engineering. They are faced with the challenge of abstract thinking and gaining programming skills for the first time. These skills are acquired by continuous practicing from the start of the course. In order to enhance the motivation and dynamism of the learning and assessment processes, we have proposed the use of three educational resources namely screencasts, self-assessment questionnaires and automated grading of assignments. These resources have been made available in Moodle which is a Learning Management System widely used in education environments and adopted by the Telecommunications Engineering School at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). Both teachers and students can enhance the learning and assessment processes through the use of new educational activities such as self-assessment questionnaires and automated grading of assignments. On the other hand, multimedia resources such as screencasts can guide students in complex topics. The resources proposed allow teachers to improve their tutorial actions since they provide immediate feedback and comments to students without the enormous effort of manual correction and evaluation by teachers specially taking into account the large number of students enrolled in the course. In this paper we present the case study where three proposed educational resources were applied. We describe the special features of the course and explain why the use of these resources can both enhance the students? motivation and improve the teaching and learning processes. Our research work was carried out on students attending the "Computer programming" course offered in the first year of a Telecommunications Engineering degree at UPM. This course is mandatory and has more than 450 enrolled students. Our purpose is to encourage the motivation and dynamism of the learning and assessment processes.

An experience on mechatronics teaching on undergraduate students by means of the Skybot platform: from classroom to robot competition

This paper analyzes the learning experiences and opinions from a group of undergraduate students in a course about Robotics. The contents of this course were taught as a set of seminars. In each seminar, the student learned interdisciplinary knowledge of computer science, control engineering, electronics and other fields related to Robotics. The aim of this course is that the students are able to design and implement their own and custom robotic solution for a series of tests planned by the teachers. These tests measure the behavior and mechatronic features of the students' robots. Finally, the students' robots are confronted with some competitions. In this paper, the low-cost robotic architecture used by the students, the contents of the course, the tests to compare the solutions of students and the opinion of them are amply discussed.

A Survey on FPGA-Based Sensor Systems: Towards Intelligent and Reconfigurable Low-Power Sensors for Computer Vision, Control and Signal Processing

The current trend in the evolution of sensor systems seeks ways to provide more accuracy and resolution, while at the same time decreasing the size and power consumption. The use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provides specific reprogrammable hardware technology that can be properly exploited to obtain a reconfigurable sensor system. This adaptation capability enables the implementation of complex applications using the partial reconfigurability at a very low-power consumption. For highly demanding tasks FPGAs have been favored due to the high efficiency provided by their architectural flexibility (parallelism, on-chip memory, etc.), reconfigurability and superb performance in the development of algorithms. FPGAs have improved the performance of sensor systems and have triggered a clear increase in their use in new fields of application. A new generation of smarter, reconfigurable and lower power consumption sensors is being developed in Spain based on FPGAs. In this paper, a review of these developments is presented, describing as well the FPGA technologies employed by the different research groups and providing an overview of future research within this field.

Control and Guidance of Low-Cost Robots via Gesture Perception for Monitoring Activities in the Home

This paper describes the development of a low-cost mini-robot that is controlled by visual gestures. The prototype allows a person with disabilities to perform visual inspections indoors and in domestic spaces. Such a device could be used as the operator's eyes obviating the need for him to move about. The robot is equipped with a motorised webcam that is also controlled by visual gestures. This camera is used to monitor tasks in the home using the mini-robot while the operator remains quiet and motionless. The prototype was evaluated through several experiments testing the ability to use the mini-robot’s kinematics and communication systems to make it follow certain paths. The mini-robot can be programmed with specific orders and can be tele-operated by means of 3D hand gestures to enable the operator to perform movements and monitor tasks from a distance.