PhaROS has being in this last edition of FOSDEM (2014) we are proud to share our time and space with a lot of open source projects. Thank you very much for good feelings, feedback and sharing this amazing time.
Video and photos from this great event will be soon available here. Meanwhile, here are the slides
Keep tuned!
At the ESUG 2013 conference, we presented the current status of the RoboShop project. Santiago did a great job and now we are able to run tests of our scenario of a helper robot in a shopping mall. Based on a map built using laser SLAM, the robot computes the shortest path to fetch items listed by a customer in a shopping list. The slides below include a video of the first tests. They also give a bird’s eye view of the architecture, where we use Pharo for orchestration. We also reuse existing software from the ROS community through our client PhaROS.
Location: Mines de Douai and ENSTA Brest (France)
Advisor and contacts:
Noury Bouraqadi, Luc Fabresse, Jannik Laval (car _at_ mines-douai.fr, website: http://car.mines-douai.fr/)
Loïc Lagadec (loic.lagadec _at_ ensta-bretagne.fr)
Profile: the candidate must hold a recent Master of Science degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering and must have solid skills in dynamic reflective language and OOP.
Description of the work:
The goal of this PhD is to study Smalltalk integration with FPGAs for robotic applications. This integration will enable us get the best from both worlds. Developers are provided with a high-level dynamic reflective language (Smalltalk) for building and debugging their applications. Still, we can have high performances by projecting part of the programs into FPGAs. These reconfigurable hardware chips can achieve performance faster than C programs, while consuming much less energy.
The work to do can decompose into the following tasks:
-Build reference robotic applications fully in Pharo Smalltalk using actual robots (see http://car.mines-douai.fr/robots/)
-Analyze these applications to identify critical parts to project on FPGAs to significantly increase performances (speed, energy)
-Do the actual projection to FPGA and evaluate performances of the transformed applications
-Generalize the approach and define a methodology for turning Smalltalk code into FPGA
-Propose a solution to automate the methodology
The Ph.D student will receive a grant which net amount is approximately 1420 euros per month for 3 years (36 months).
He will be co-supervised by Loïc Lagadec from the ENSTA-Bretagne (Lab-STICC, Brest) and Jannik Laval, Luc Fabresse and Noury Bouraqadi from Ecole des Mines de Douai (CAR, http://car.mines-douai.fr/).
The first 18th month will be spent in Douai (Lille area), while the last half of the PhD will be spent in Brest.
However, during the full 3 years, there will be a strong interaction with co-supervisers from both labs.
Bibliography:
-A Robust Layered Control System For A Mobile Robot. R. Brooks. IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation. Vol. 2. Num 1. March, 1985.
-RCS: A Cognitive Architecture for Intelligent MultiAgent Systems. J.S. Albus and A. J. Barbera. Proceedings of the 5th IFAC/EURON Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV 2004). Lisbon, Portugal, 2004.
-Handbook of Robotics. Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib editors. Springer. 2008.
-Multi-Level Simulation of Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Platforms. D. Picard and L. Lagadec. International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing. 2012.
-High-level synthesis for FPGAs: From Prototyping to Deployment. Jason cong and stephen neuendorffer and juanjo noguera and kees vissers and zhiru zhang. IEEE Transactions on Computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems. Vol. 30. Num 4. April, 2011.
-The MOLEN Polymorphic Processor. S. Vassiliadis and S. Wong and G. Gaydadjiev and K. Bertels and G. Kuzmanov and E. Moscu Panainte. IEEE Transactions on Computers. 2004.
I created a repository that will contain my new packages:
rosinstall ~/ros /opt/ros/groovy/ echo "source ~/ros/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc source .bashrc
Do a checkout manually of the sources:
svn co https://svn.code.sf.net/p/bosch-ros-pkg/code/trunk/stacks/exploration ~/ros/exploration
There is an broken link to btVector3 in the following file: ~/ros/exploration/explore/include/explore/explore_frontier.h
Just change the line
#include <LinearMath/btVector3.h>
to
#include <tf2/LinearMath/btVector3.h>
Then you can build the project:
rosmake exploration
Before running explore, launch turtlebot and gmapping:
roslaunch turtlebot_bringup turtlebot.launch roslaunch turtlebot_navigation gmapping_demo.launch
To run the explore node, run this command line:
roslaunch ~/ros/exploration/explore_stage/explore.xml
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
ip: 10.1.161.xx gateway: 10.1.1.1 netmask: 255.255.0.0 Proxy: 10.1.1.3:8080
sudo apt-get install python-rosdep rosdep update
sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-turtlebot ros-groovy-turtlebot-apps ros-groovy-turtlebot-viz
sudo apt-get install chrony
sudo ntpdate 10.1.1.2
/etc/chrony/chrony.conf with the correct ntp: add the line "server 10.1.1.2" you can comment the other servers.
sudo apt-get install chrony
sudo ntpdate 10.1.1.2
ip: 10.1.161.xx gateway: 10.1.1.1 netmask: 255.255.0.0 Proxy: 10.1.1.3:8080
sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-turtlebot ros-groovy-turtlebot-apps ros-groovy-turtlebot-viz . /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash rosrun kobuki_ftdi create_udev_rules echo "source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
echo export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://IP_OF_TURTLEBOT:11311 >> .bashrc echo export ROS_HOSTNAME=IP_OF_TURTLEBOT >> .bashrc
source .bashrc
echo export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://IP_OF_TURTLEBOT:11311 >> .bashrc echo export ROS_HOSTNAME=IP_OF_WORKSTATION >> .bashrc
source .bashrc
rostopic list
>>I had an error, so I did:
sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-actionlib sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-rosgraph roslaunch turtlebot_bringup minimal.launch
>>Then, reexecute the line, it should work:
rostopic list
echo $ROS_MASTER_URI rostopic echo /diagnostics echo $ROS_HOSTNAME
rostopic list rostopic echo /diagnostics
rostopic pub -r10 /hello std_msgs/String "hello"
rostopic echo /hello
The message “hello” begin printed about 10 times a second.
All works now, you can run this line on the robot (I desactivated the automatic launch of the turtlebot nodes)
roslaunch turtlebot_bringup turtlebot.launch
Sometimes, this does not work. Just finish the process (Ctrl-C) and rerun it. Sometimes, I do that 3 or 4 times before it works.
To run the camera and 3d sensors, run this line:
roslaunch turtlebot_bringup 3dsensor.launch
On the workstation, you can open the diagnostic panel:
rqt -s kobuki_dashboard
Now, you can play with Turtlebot tutorials:
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
To build the map, do not launch 3dsensor before.
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.
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.
Santiago Bragagnolo joined the team since the beginning of the month, as we announced during our talk on Smalltalk for robotics last ESUG conference (see slides below). Santiago is working full time on the RoboShop project where we aim at building an infrastructure for service robotics in the context of a shopping mall. We are using ROS (Robot Operating System) as a middleware. Currently, we are focusing on RoSt a framework to bridge Pharo Smalltalk with ROS. The end of the tunnel is becoming closer. We can call services provided by ROS nodes and we can send ROS topic messages. We are currently making tests with the ROS turtle simulator. We hopefully will soon start experimenting with our human size robots.