Oct 9, 2016 @ 09:22 |
The aim of Hardware ROS (H-ROS) is creating easily reusable and reconfigurable robot hardware components to simplify the creation of robots and allow parts from different manufacturers to interoperate.
Erle Robotics, developer of next generation of artificial brains for robots and drones is developing the Hardware Robot Operating System (H-ROS) under Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and BIT Systems (BITS) innovative program – Robotics Fast Track (RFT) Effort sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
H-ROS – Standardize Robot Hardware
The aim of H-ROS is creating easily reusable and reconfigurable robot hardware components to simplify the creation of robots and allow parts from different manufacturers to interoperate using ROS 2 as its core basis.

H-ROS will help companies create robot components that speak ROS natively. With H-ROS, building a robot is about placing H-ROS compatible hardware components together. Handling robots won’t be restricted to a few with high technical skills but will instead be extended to a great majority with a general understanding of the different H-ROS part types. In general H-ROS has five types of parts: cognition, communication, sensing, actuation and Hybrid.
H-ROS part Types:
- Sensing: H-ROS sensing components (e.g. LiDAR, IMU, Camera, GPS) helps robots to perceive it’s environment and share the information with rest of the parts through standardized H-ROS interfaces.
- Cognition: This part is the brain of robot. This performs most of the computational tasks (e.g. data fusion from multiple sensors and planning) within the robot and insures the coordination with other robot parts. It also deals with the reconfiguration process of H-ROS parts (plug and play functionality) and exposes ROS interfaces for new computations.
- Actuation: H-ROS actuation components are smart actuators that support dynamic reconfiguration by subscribing and publishing to the corresponding H-ROS interfaces.
- Communication: H-ROS communication parts are robot hardware components compliant with the H-ROS ecosystem specialized in communication. These parts either expose new communication channels (e.g. wifi, Bluetooth, Ethernet etc) to the overall H-ROS network or provide means of interconnection between different H-ROS hardware.
- Hybrid: this part includes those components that can’t be classified within the other H-ROS part type (e.g. display screen). The objective of H-ROS hybrid layer is to provide a set of abstractions that enable these kinds of devices to interoperate directly with the H-ROS environment.
Robotics Fast Track
Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and BIT Systems (BITS) came with innovative Robotics Fast Track (RFT) program to rapidly build and deployment of the robots. H-ROS is the one of projects of RFT effort. The RFT effort has two goals:
- Enable rapid, cost-effective development of new robotics capabilities designed to respond to, and even anticipate, quickly evolving needs in space, maritime, ground, and air operations. RFT will focus on the development of groundbreaking robotic hardware and software by funding novel approaches as well as creative adaptations of existing technologies.
- Achieve breakthrough capabilities in less time and at a fraction of the cost typical of government-supported robotic development processes by engaging highly agile organizations and individuals who traditionally have not worked with the U.S. government.
Related Articles:
Programming Robots with Blocks
Most of the people quickly understand the different mechanical parts of a robot, but understanding the underlying ROS software is something that took quite a bit of effort. To make programming robots even simple and interesting, engineers came with idea for ROS– programming with blocks. With the help of new ROS package, now you can create your ROS based algorithms into programs without the deep knowledge of underlying ROS software.
robot_blockly is a ROS package that provides web-based visualization and block programming tools for robots.
robot_blockly is a ROS package that allows users to create ROS-based algorithms and behaviors, abstracting its complexity using blocks. The aim of the package is to hide the complexity of programming robots via functional blocks. As a rule of thumb, an average PhD student takes 3 weeks to learn ROS. This makes ROS programming not accessible for the great majority. The robot_blockly package aims to simplify the process of using ROS to the point of putting conceptual blocks together.
The concept of both H-ROS and block programming presented in ROSCon 2016 on 8th October 2016 held in Seoul, South Korea.
- Keywords: ROS, H-ROS, Robot_blockly, RFt, DARPA, OSRF
- Image: ros.org