robot bus
The solution that makes different manufacturer's robotic hardware compatible. An arrangement of hardware, software and physical channel to allow the real-time transfer of data between robots and robot components in a secure and safe manner.
H-ROS ecosystem members:
The robot bus delivers determinism, synchronization, security and safety to robot communications allowing to build interoperable robot modules for real plug + play and extensible robots.
Robot hardware is made interoperable by deploying H-ROS in each robot component through a tiny device called SoM.
H-ROS facilitates a common interface (HRIM) that enables communication among different robot modules, regardless of the manufacturer.
Extend robot modules and add additional functionality using our API powered by ROS 2.
H-ROS empowered modules are recognized automatically, dynamically. This allows to build robots that adapt and change depending on the available hardware.
H-ROS enables distributed sub-microsecond clock synchronization accuracy. Allowing accurate motion control coordination and accurate sensor data acquisition timestamping.
Powered by a hybrid architecture and featuring Linux, the H-ROS SoM delivers a deterministic real-time operating system.
The H-ROS robot bus enables robot applications to operate predictably in the presence of network congestion while fulfilling their deadlines.
Purely distributed robot modules built with ROS 2. First class participants of the ROS 2 ecosystem.
An encrypted and assessed computing and communication environment. The H-ROS robot bus is designed with best security practices and exposed to continuous security audits.
H-ROS supports Over-The-Air updates on each robot part. The SoM keeps robots and robot modules updated, seamlessly.
Applying individual policy rules through the robot bus, the H-ROS SoM ensures that modules meet their specifications and don't compromise the network.
H-ROS allows for a variety of different redundant network architectures (daisy chain, line, ring, tree, etc) gaining reliability.
H-ROS enables the growth from individual modules to large robots filed with hundreds of them in multi-network setups.
Reserve bandwidth for high-priority traffic with the H-ROS robot bus while, at the same time, ensuring that best effort traffic will continue to flow.
H-ROS allows to dynamically estimate the available bandwidth in the network and empowers roboticists with its status.
Our roboticists' know-how can be examined in the following papers
Many of the existing real-time industrial solutions will slowly be replaced by TSN. This will lead towards a unified landscape of physically interoperable robots and robot components. We discuss some of the TSN features relevant for deterministic communications and evaluate experimentally one of the shaping mechanisms –the time-aware shaper– in an exemplary robotic scenario.
DownloadAs robotics systems become more distributed, the communications between different robot parts play a key role for the reliability of the overall robot control. We evaluate the real-time performance of UDP based communications in Linux on multi- core embedded devices as test platforms.
DownloadAn evaluation of ROS 2.0 communications in a robotic inter-component (hardware) communication case on top of Linux. We demonstrate experimentally how computation and network congestion impacts the communication latencies and propose a setup that, under certain conditions, mitigates these delays and obtains bounded traffic.
DownloadWe propose a new sub-class of cobots named M-cobots and demonstrate how with them we are able to obtain distributed sub-microsecond clock synchronization accuracy among modules, timestamping accuracy of ROS 2.0 messages under 100 microseconds and millisecond-level end-to-end communication latencies.
DownloadHaving modular robot parts can considerably reduce the integration effort of building robots. We present a joint hardware and software infrastructure to create those vendor-agnostic and reconfigurable robot parts.
