Abstract
The integration of robots with the Internet is nowadays an emerging trend, as new form of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). This integration is crucially important to promote new types of cloud robotics applications where robots are virtualized, controlled and monitored through the Internet. This paper proposes ROSLink, a new protocol to integrate Robot Operating System (ROS) enabled-robots with the IoT. The motivation behind ROSLink is the lack of ROS functionality in monitoring and controlling robots through the Internet. Although, ROS allows control of a robot from a workstation using the same ROS master, however this solution is not scalable and rather limited to a local area network. Solutions proposed in recent works rely on centralized ROS Master or robot-side Web servers sharing similar limitations. Inspired from the MAVLink protocol, the proposed ROSLink protocol defines a lightweight asynchronous communication protocol between the robots and the end-users through the cloud. ROSLink leverages the use of a proxy cloud server that links ROS-enabled robots with users and allows the interconnection between them. ROSLink performance was tested on the cloud and was shown to be efficient and reliable.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Dronemap project entitled “DroneMap: A Cloud Robotics System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Surveillance Applications” under the grant number 35-157 from King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), and supported by Prince Sultan University. In addition, the authors would like to thank the Robotics and Internet of Things (RIoT) Unit at Prince Sultan University’s Innovation Center for their support to this work. The authors would like also to thank Gaitech Robotics in China for their support to this work.
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Koubaa, A., Alajlan, M., Qureshi, B. (2017). ROSLink: Bridging ROS with the Internet-of-Things for Cloud Robotics. In: Koubaa, A. (eds) Robot Operating System (ROS). Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 707. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54927-9_8
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