BRICS - Best Practice in Robotics

• Home
• BRICS in a nutshell
• Consortium
• Research
  • Hardware building blocks
  • Architectures, middleware, and interfaces
  • Best practice in robot algorithms
  • Model driven engineering and tool chain
  • Openness and flexibility
  • Robust autonomy
  • Harmonized interfaces
• Showcases
• BRICS Research Camps
• The Tower of Hanoi for robotics
• Publications
• BRICS News
• BRICS Events
• Related activities
• Contact

Best practice in robot algorithms

Harmonizing robotics algorithms, so that they are easily replaceable by another, is often not viewed as a fundamental scientific problem, but a software engineering task. Although there is a substantial amount of software engineering effort involved in this activity, there is also a number of fundamental issues to address. The BRICS consortium wants to develop a framework that can be applied to a large number of robotic tasks and algorithms, and not only to one or two.

The challenge is to make such a framework sustainable, so that it accommodates not only existing algorithms but also future developments, and the real challenge is to make this framework really appealing to the robotics community.

The following scientific and technical key issues will be addressed in this activity:

• harmonisation of operational context and conditions for algorithms
• specification and harmonisation of performance requirements
• definition of (a language for) abstraction levels and generic descriptions of robot algorithms including description of I/O behaviour, module dependencies, timing and hardware dependencies
• harmonisation of data structures and external (and internal) models referred to by an algorithm
• harmonisation of interfaces, and communication mechanisms (jointly with WP2)
• analysis of real-time requirements
• definition of test conditions, procedures and benchmarks for comparative evaluation.

To reach the goals of this activity five major contributions are planned:

• The most important contribution is an approach for identification and re-factoring of best practice robot algorithms. This approach should be applicable to any topic in robotics for which competitive and comparable algorithms are developed.
• The approach will be applied to multiple specific robotics topics, resulting in software libraries of interchangeable algorithms. During the runtime of the project a minimum of three libraries will be compiled, among them for the topics of mobile manipulation, 3D perception and modelling, and robust obstacle avoidance.
• The approach will involve a comparative evaluation of algorithms through specific benchmarks.
• A major involvement of the community requires a certain technical infrastructure for software development. The setup of this infrastructure will be a technical contribution of the project.
• A series of six research camps will be organised to reach out to the research community and to get feedback on the developed methodology and framework and to assure acceptance.

Results:

• G. Arbeiter, J. Fischer, A. Verl. 3-D-Environment Reconstruction for Mobile Robots using fast- SLAM and Feature Extraction. In: K. Neumann, Kristin (Ed.), R.D. Schraft (Chairman), K. Berns (Chairman). International Federation of Robotics: Joint International Conference of ISR/ROBOTIK2010. Munich, 7-9 June 2010, Berlin, Offenbach, VDE-Verlag, 2010, S. 291-295.
• R. Bischoff, T. Guhl, E. Prassler, W. Nowak, G. Kraetzschmar, H. Bruyninckx, P. Soetens, M. Haegele, A. Pott, P. Breedveld, J. Broenink, D. Brugali and N. Tomatis. BRICS − Best practice in robotics. In Proc. of the IFR International Symposium on Robotics (ISR 2010), June 2010, Munich, Germany.
• S. Blumenthal. Best Practice Algorithms in 3D Perception and Modeling. Master Thesis, Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. Submitted March 2010.
• Benchmarks for Mobile Manipulation and Robust Obstacle Avoidance and Navigation: BRICS Deliverable D3.1 available.