We haven’t updated the blog with robotics news in a while, but we actually have plenty to tell and much more to come soon.
First of all the robotics team has gained new strength with the addition of Andy, Dimitris, Leo, Rod, and Thomas. Tobi and Lukasz have left us, but we are still working on collaborating remotely.
On top of amazing people, the team has grown also in terms of robots. From the month of October we have finally started receiving our new robotic hardware and got to play with it.
KubeCon / CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 took place at the shiny Bella Center of Copenhagen on May 2 – 4, 2018.
Here at ICCLab/SPLab we use extensively Kubernetes / CNCF technologies both in teaching and research, but we had one extra reason for being there this year: our friends and colleagues from Rapyuta Robotics (RR) were scheduled to give a talk on Cloud Robotics PaaS.
Bella Center – Copenhagen
The ECRP Project uses Kubernetes/Openshift as the base for its Cloud-Robotics PaaS. Apart from running robotic applications distributed across robots and clouds, we wanted to assess whether latency to the closest public data-center (Frankfurt for both AWS and GKE) would be low enough to run common SLAM and navigation apps. The short answer is YES, although our work there continues.
Thanks to the work of Seán, Bruno, and Remo, the ICCLab has a brand new Openstack cluster. The Cloud-Robotics crew decided to take it for a spin, and use some research grant money on public clouds also for other activities (e.g., FaaS / Serverless computing).
ICCLab has been yet again awarded with AWS Cloud Credits for Research.
We wish to thank again Amazon for supporting our work!
Two of the most influential robotics events of 2016, ROSCon and IROS, were conveniently co-located in South Korea during the second week of October.
We had previously attended ROSCon 2015 in Hamburg, but it was our first time at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), this year in Daejeon.
Title: ECRP – Enterprise Cloud Robotics Platform
Industry Partner: Rapyuta Robotics
Research Partner: SPLab/ICCLab, ZHAW
Funded By: Commission for Technology and Innovation
Summary:
The ECRP project combines cutting edge robotics technology from Rapyuta Robotics (RR), an ETH Zurich spinoff, and novel cloud development from the Service Prototyping (SPLab) and InIT Cloud Computing Lab (ICCLab) at ZHAW.
With ICCLab, RR will transform its existing open source robotics platform from a prototype to a full-fledged cloud-native enterprise ecosystem for third-party applications combining physical devices with cloud-hosted functionality.
RR and ZHAW have agreed to release this work as open source software (OSS), under the label Rapyuta Core.
The goal of the Cloud Robotics initiative of the SPLab is to ease the integration of Cloud Computing and Robotics workloads. One of the first things we need to sort out is how to leverage different networking models available on the cloud to support these mixed workloads.
In this blog post we’ll see one little handy trick to have ROS nodes run as pods (and services) in any Kubernetes cluster so that they can transparently communicate using a ROS topic.
The Service Engineering (SE, blog.zhaw.ch/icclab) group at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) / Institute of Applied Information Technology (InIT) in Switzerland is seeking applications for a full-time position at its Winterthur facility.
The successful candidate will work in the Service Prototyping Lab (SPLab) and will contribute to the Cloud Native Applications (CNA) research initiative, see https://blog.zhaw.ch/icclab/category/research-approach/themes/cloud-native-applications/
The Service Engineering (SE, blog.zhaw.ch/icclab) group at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) / Institute of Applied Information Technology (InIT) in Switzerland is seeking applications for a full-time position at its Winterthur facility.
The successful candidate will work in the Service Prototyping Lab (SPLab) and will contribute to the research initiative on cloud robotics, see https://blog.zhaw.ch/icclab/category/research-approach/themes/cloud-robotics
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We received our RPLIDAR this morning and, just as kids on Christmas day, we were very eager to play with it right away.
But I’ll hold my horses, as I can hear you ask: “and what exactly is a RPLIDAR?”
A RPLIDAR is a low cost LIDAR sensor (i.e., a light-based radar, a “laser scanner”) from Robo Peak suitable for indoor robotic applications. Basically a cheaper version of that weird rotating thing you see on top of the Google self-driving cars. You can use it for collision avoidance and for the robot to quickly figure out what’s around it.
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