ROSDevCon2018 Day 1: ROSLink - Connecting ROS-enabled Robots to the Internet-of-Things and Clouds

ROS Developers Conference 2019 Registration is Now Open: http://rosdevcon.com

Speaker: Dr. Anis Koubaa | Professor and Head of Robotics and Internet of Things Research Lab at Prince Sultan University
http://www.theconstructsim.com/ros-developers-online-conference-2018-rdc-worldwide/ros-developers-conference-anis-koubaa/

*Title and Abstract of the Speech

ROSLink: Connecting ROS-enabled Robots to the Internet-of-Things and Clouds

Short statement of objectives:
When you deploy a robot with ROS, basically, you need to be connected with the robot and this typically happens within the scope of a local area network. Such a scope restricts the access to the robot to small range. 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.

In this tutorial, we present the ROSLink protocol, which is 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.

In this tutorial, I will present the following:
- The limitation of using a shared ROS master in a local area network
- Existing approaches to integrated ROS to Internet.
- System architecture of ROSLink protocol
- Implementation steps of the ROSLink protocol for custom robots
- Hands-on demonstration to control robots and drones over the Internet using ROSLink

#Robotics #Conference #ROSDevCon18