Biblio
Industrial robots are playing an important role in now a day industrial productions. However, due to the increasing in robot hardware modules and the rapid expansion of software modules, the reliability of operating systems for industrial robots is facing severe challenges, especially for the light-weight edge computing platforms. Based on current technologies on resource security isolation protection and access control, a novel resource management model for real-time edge system of multiple robot arms is proposed on light-weight edge devices. This novel resource management model can achieve the following functions: mission-critical resource classification, resource security access control, and multi-level security data isolation transmission. We also propose a fault location and isolation model on each lightweight edge device, which ensures the reliability of the entire system. Experimental results show that the robot operating system can meet the requirements of hierarchical management and resource access control. Compared with the existing methods, the fault location and isolation model can effectively locate and deal with the faults generated by the system.
A Robot Operating System (ROS) plays a significant role in organizing industrial robots for manufacturing. With an increasing number of the robots, the operators integrate a ROS with networked communication to share the data. This cyber-physical nature exposes the ROS to cyber attacks. To this end, this paper proposes a cross-layer approach to achieve secure and resilient control of a ROS. In the physical layer, due to the delay caused by the security mechanism, we design a time-delay controller for the ROS agent. In the cyber layer, we define cyber states and use Markov Decision Process to evaluate the tradeoffs between physical and security performance. Due to the uncertainty of the cyber state, we extend the MDP to a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP). We propose a threshold solution based on our theoretical results. Finally, we present numerical examples to evaluate the performance of the secure and resilient mechanism.
This paper describes an experiment carried out to demonstrate robustness and trustworthiness of an orchestrated two-layer network test-bed (PROnet). A Robotic Operating System Industrial (ROS-I) distributed application makes use of end-to-end flow services offered by PROnet. The PROnet Orchestrator is used to provision reliable end-to-end Ethernet flows to support the ROS-I application required data exchange. For maximum reliability, the Orchestrator provisions network resource redundancy at both layers, i.e., Ethernet and optical. Experimental results show that the robotic application is not interrupted by a fiber outage.
In the last few years, a shift from mass production to mass customisation is observed in the industry. Easily reprogrammable robots that can perform a wide variety of tasks are desired to keep up with the trend of mass customisation while saving costs and development time. Learning by Demonstration (LfD) is an easy way to program the robots in an intuitive manner and provides a solution to this problem. In this work, we discuss and evaluate LAP, a three-stage LfD method that conforms to the criteria for the high-mix-low-volume (HMLV) industrial settings. The algorithm learns a trajectory in the task space after which small segments can be adapted on-the-fly by using a human-in-the-loop approach. The human operator acts as a high-level adaptation, correction and evaluation mechanism to guide the robot. This way, no sensors or complex feedback algorithms are needed to improve robot behaviour, so errors and inaccuracies induced by these subsystems are avoided. After the system performs at a satisfactory level after the adaptation, the operator will be removed from the loop. The robot will then proceed in a feed-forward fashion to optimise for speed. We demonstrate this method by simulating an industrial painting application. A KUKA LBR iiwa is taught how to draw an eight figure which is reshaped by the operator during adaptation.