Last may, Dr. Luc Fabresse presented at the ICRA 2013 workshop on Software Development and Integration in Robotics (SDIRIII) our first results in the CAIRE project. It’s about a first version of BoTest, a first version of a UnitTest framework based on the work done in eXtreme Programming, that we adapted to the context of robotics. We give a glimpse of experiments we are doing with our robots. The slides of the presentation are available below.
The 11th IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics continues its tradition of attracting cutting-edge papers in the theory and practice of robots for all types of safety, security, and rescue applications such as disaster response, mitigation and recovery; rapid and secure inspection of critical infrastructure; detection of chemical, biological and radiological risks, and operations in these dangerous sites.
SSRR 2013 also serves as an entry point for researchers and technologists who want to learn more about safety, security and rescue robotics, through tutorials and keynotes.
A Rescue Robotics Camp, attached to the conference, gives participants the opportunity to learn about the state of the art algorithms for Search and Rescue Robots and their use. The camp is organized in collaboration with the NIFTi EU project and RoboCup.
Papers and participation fall into:
Topics include but are not limited to:
In addition, SSRR 2013 encourages the submission of “non-traditional” papers which contribute to understanding robot systems for Public Safety and have an explicit link to Public Safety but may not have results in a high fidelity SSRR domain.
SSRR 2013 will have three paper awards:
Important Dates
In the RoboShop project, we aim at developing a platform for robotic applications in a shopping mall. We took the decision to use ROS, the robotic middleware backed by the Open Source Robotic Foundation. We also wanted to continue using our favorite language Pharo. This is how we end up developing PhaROS, a client for Pharo-based ROS nodes.
Today, we are glad to announce that the first version of PhaROS is now officially available, that is there is :
There is still much to do in PhaROS, and more broadly in the RoboShop project. But, so far we already have a PhaROS node that wraps the robot that we are using. We connected it to the gmapping SLAM algorithm and we have used it to buid a map of our lab. More to come soon.
The CAR team (http://car.mines-douai.fr) carries research at the frontier of Software Engineering and Robotics. We study software architectures, languages and tools for controlling individual robots. We have developed an expertise in reflective and dynamic languages, as well as component models, for a modular robotic software architectures. Besides, our research also addresses coordination and cooperation in robotic fleets. We mainly focus on communication models as well as emerging or predefined organizations for multi-agent robotic systems.
The post-doc position is part of the CAIRE project. The goal of the project is to propose innovative solutions for the agile development of robotic software. The study will be validated by developing new robotic-based exploration and mapping solutions.
The candidate must have a PhD in Computer Science or Robotics, should demonstrate strong programming skills, and have research interests in at least one of the following areas:
- modularity and software composition
- programming languages design
- agile software development
- robotic middleware
- control architectures for robots
- multi-agent robotic systems
Important information:
-Workplace : Douai (Lille area), France
-Start: Between May and October 2013
-Duration : 18 months
-Salary approx. 2000 Euros.
To apply, please send your CV + references to : noury (DOT) bouraqadi (AT) mines-douai.fr
The goal of the RoboShop project is to make a robot for services into a shopping mall. From the hardware point of view, we are using two wheeled robots, equipped with a laser SICK 300 range finder, as well IR and sonar telemeters (see Picture 1). Each robot has a pole that is about 1.5 m heigh. It holds a tablet PC and Pan/Tilt camera.
Picture 1: Robots we use for the RoboShop project
On the software side, we have chosen the ROS middleware. The rational behind this choice is that ROS is backed by an active community, structured around Willow Garage and more recently the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). On the programming side, we took the reflective language Pharo. As Object-Oriented experts, we believe that Pharo is among the best (if not THE best) object-oriented programming language. Besides, it’s available under a free software license, and it’s community (backed by the INRIA french public research organization dedicated to computer science) is continuously improving it.
The first step was to develop a ROS client in Pharo: PhaROS = PHAro + ROS (initially named RoSt). So far, we have a first complete, running version. We have also developed a ROS node to control our robot. As a first validation, we drove the robot inside our lab and make it build a map (see Picture 2). That was also an opportunity to test our client with a third party ROS node, namely gmapping. We fed this Synchronous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithm with data from the laser embedded on the robot.
Picture 2: Our lab’s map built by a robot
We are currently working on automatic map construction. The robot should be able to roam autonomously to build the map. This will lead us to test other parts of our infrastructure. Ultimately, the robot should be able to navigate in the building based on the existing map. It should be able to plan its trajectories to reach it destination while avoiding obstacles even if they are not on its initial map. Such obstacles include moving ones such as people or other robots.
The 8th french national conference on “Control Architectures of Robots” will be held this year in the beautiful city of Angers next 12-13 june. As for every edition since 2006, the CAR conference will gather researchers of the french robotics community interested in the transverse theme of embedded software for controlling autonomous robots. This event is an opportunity to get an overview of research currently conducted in french labs.
During the execution of object-oriented applications, several millions of objects are created, used and then collected if they are not referenced. Problems appear when objects are unused but cannot be garbage-collected because they are still referenced from other objects. This is an issue because those objects waste primary memory and applications use more primary memory than they actually need.
Relying on the operating system’s (OS) virtual memory is not always enough since it cannot take into account the domain and structure of applications. At the same time, applications have no easy way to parametrize nor cooperate with memory management.
In our latest paper published in JOT, we present Marea, an efficient application-level object graph swapper for object-oriented programming languages. Its main goal is to offer the programmer a novel solution to handle application-level memory. Developers can instruct our system to release primary memory by swapping out unused yet referenced objects to secondary memory. Our approach has been qualitatively and quantitatively validated. Our experiments and benchmarks on real-world applications show that Marea can reduce the memory footprint between 23% and 36%.
This end of the year comes with good news. Our research on robotic exploration and mapping received a two years funding from the Région Nord-Pas de Calais for a proposal entitled: CAIRE. This project that will be kicked off in 2013 involves two other partners: the RMoD team from INRIA Lille, and the Telice team from the IEMN lab of Lille.
The goal of the CAIRE project is to propose a methodology as well as an infrastructure for developing modular software to control robot for building maps of unknown buildings. One originality of our approach is that we fully rely on dynamic languages and more specifically on the Pharo reflective language. Dynamicity enables fast development and eases debugging. Besides, we rely on reflective and meta-level facilities for building tools and adapting the language to fit our needs.
Research we will be conducting in the CAIRE project will complement our previous work on cooperative exploration of unknown terrain using a fleet of robots. CAIRE is also related to our ongoing project RoboShop which aims at experimenting with robots in a shopping mall. In both projects we are using human size wheeled robots. They also share the same middleware: the de facto standard ROS, from the Open Source Robotics Foundation.
Last october the 29th, Mariano Martinez Peck successufuly defended his PhD entitled “Application-Level Virtual Memory for Object-Oriented Systems“. The jury agreed on the importance and the quality of the contributions that were published in different journals and conferences. If you are interested learn more, you can find below the slides of the defense, as well as the video recording of Mariano’s talk.
I’m happy to announce the arrival of a new colleague: Dr. Jannik Laval.
Officially, Jannik started working for our team since Friday 2nd november 2012. That was a Pharo sprint day hosted by our partner the RMoD INRIA Lille team. This was the opportunity to revive our dormant project: OCEAN. Luc Fabresse, Jannik Laval and my self are the main contributors of this new network library for Pharo. We worked a on it while Jannik was doing his PhD. An now that he is back, we have new energy to get this project done.
However, the main effort that we all concetrate on is Robotics. With the rest of the CAR team, we target models, software infrastructures and tools to ease the development of control architectures for robots. We expect to produce soon some cool demos.