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Robotics and Internet of Things Unit

Technical Report · August 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.22955.95522

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Robotics and Internet of Things Unit

Annual Report 2016-2017

Unit Head: Prof. Anis Koubaa

August 22, 2017

Contents
1 What is RIOTU? 4

2 Research Team 5

3 Training 5

4 Attracted Grants 5

5 Research Collaboration 6

6 Student Involvement 6

7 Funded Research Projects 6

7.1 Completed Research Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7.2 Submitted Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

8 Resources and Facilities 7

9 Software 8

10 Summary of Research Contribution 8

11 Publications 14

12 Experiments 16

13 Future plan 16

14 Requirements 17

2
List of Figures
1 Different drones platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3 Dronemap Planner Web Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4 ROSLink Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5 DroneMap System Architectur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6 ROSLink Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7 Flight test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3
1 What is RIOTU?
The Robotics and Internet of Things Unit (RIOTU) is a research unit established un-
der the umbrella of the Center of Excellence at Prince Sultan University in September
2016. RIOTU is lead by Prof. Anis Koubaa. The objective of RIOTU is to conduct
research and attract external funds related to Robotics and Internet of Things areas,
to contribute to the 2020 National Transformation Plan, and the 2030 Vision.

Vision
To be an internationally recognized centre in Robotics and Internet-of-Things (IoT).

Mission

• To promote applied research on Robotics and Internet of Things in Prince Sul-

tan University through international collaboration with industrial and academic
partners

• To develop robotics and IoT solutions for real applications to sustain the economic
and social development in Saudi Arabia inline with 2030 vision.

Objectives

• Establish a professional research environment in PSU in the robotics and IoT

research.

• Attract external funds and grants to PSU.

• Provide a consultation service to the industry both locally and internationally.

• Develop robotics and IoT solutions for the Saudi Market in collaboration with
international companies.

• Providing training services to communities in the field of robotics and IoT.

• Contribute to the involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in profes-

sional research and promote their intellectual and learning skills.

• Establish international collaboration with reputed research groups and institu-

tions in robotics and IoT.

• Contribute to the enrichment of computer science and engineering programs in

the field of robotics and IoT

4
2 Research Team
• Dr. Anis Koubaa (Leader) Robotic Software Engineering, Internet-of- Things,
Wireless Sensor Networks, Cloud Robotics, Robot Operating System (ROS).

• Dr. Basit Qureshi (Senior Researcher) Cloud Computing, Distributed Sys-

tems, Data Mining, Cyber-Security, Big data frameworks, Trust Management,
Mobile Computing, Mobile Social Networks

• Dr. Dhafer Almakles (Senior Researcher) Control Theory, Non-Linear Con-

trol, Networked, Event-triggered and Quantized Control Systems, Design Nonlin-
ear Control System

• Mr. Yasir Javed (Researcher) Mobile Robots, Robot Operating System

(ROS), 5G Networks, Data Mining

• Ms. Maram Alajlan (Researcher) Robot Operating System (ROS), Robotics

Path Planning, Internet-of-Things, Cloud Robotics

• Mr. Mohamed Almustafa (Coop-Student) Network Engineering, Mobile

Robots, Drone Application

3 Training
The Robotics and Internet of Things Unit organized two drone-training sessions, the
first conducted from Tuesday to Thursday March 28-30, 2017. The second drone train-
ing session conducted from Tuesday to Thursday April 18-20, 2017. The event is tech-
nically sponsored by the ACM. The training was given by Prof. Anis Koubaa. Twenty
participants registered. The objective of the drone training was to give an introduction
to the basics of building a drone, and controlling and monitoring it using a Ground
Station. It provides a comprehensive overview of the hardware used to build a drone,
software and protocols used to control the drone. Overall, the participants were truly
satisfied of the training program and get the skills and ability to build and run their
first drone. More sessions are planned.

4 Attracted Grants
• Research Grant from Gaitech Robotics Company: 10000 USD = 37500
SAR.

• Drone Training: 40000 SAR

• Total External Fund = 77500 SAR

5
5 Research Collaboration
The Robotics and Internet of Things promotes international collaboration with both
academia and industry. RIOTU has strong collaboration with Gaitech Robotics, a
world-reputed robotic company located in China. A research collaboration agreement
was signed between the Center of Excellence in Prince Sultan University and Gaitech
Robotics, and PSU received an external fund of 4000 USD from Gaitech to support
research and development of RIOTU. On the other hand, RIOTU maintain research
collaboration with CISTER research center, a top-ranked center in Portugal and spe-
cialized in real-time and embedded systems.

6 Student Involvement
• Six students involved in professional research in robotics club

• Paid students’ internship with Gaitech company

• Web development course students developed the new Website of Gaitech

7 Funded Research Projects

7.1 Completed Research Projects
• DroneMap: A Cloud Robotics System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Surveil-
lance Applications, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST),
Budget: 181000 SAR.

6
 • 3D Virtual Environment for Disaster Management using Cooperative Autonomous
Agents and Sensor Networks, Prince Sultan University, Budget: 160000 SAR.

7.2 Submitted Projects

• SafeDrone: Safety and Security for the Internet-of-Drones, King Abdulaziz City
for Science and Technology (KACST), Budget: 600000 SAR.

• RankRoad: Simple and Effective Quality of Roads Assessment Using Motion, King
Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Budget: 600000 SAR.

• SEEF: A Secure and Energy Efficient Framework for Smart Cities Applications,
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), 600000 SAR.

• PalmDrone: Red Palm Weevil Early Detect and Combat Using Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), 170000 SAR.

8 Resources and Facilities

• Different drones platforms: RIOTU has a large variety of drones ranging
from custom home-built drones to commercial drones with different capabili-
ties. RIOTU has produced a leading research in what concerns the integration of
drones/robots with the Internet of Things and the Cloud.

Figure 1: Different drones platforms

7
 (a) (b) (c)

Figure 2

• RIOTU Cloud Computing Platform: RIOTU deployed several cloud clusters

using single board computers (i.e. Rapsberry PI and Odroid XU4), and also
commodity desktop computers.

• IoT devices and sensors: RIOTU has several types of sensor devices for de-
veloping Internet of Things apps.

9 Software
• Dronemap Planner: first cloud-based drone/robot management system over the
Internet

• ROSLink protocol: connecting ROS robots to the IoT and the cloud

10 Summary of Research Contribution

Dronemap
Deploying drones over the Cloud is an emerging research area motivated by the emer-
gence of Cloud Robotics and the Internet-of-Drones (loD) paradigms. This paper con-
tributes to IoD and to the deployment of drones over the cloud. It presents, Dronemap

8
 Figure 3: Dronemap Planner Web Application

Planner, an innovative service-oriented cloud based drone management system that pro-
vides access to drones through web services (SOAP and REST), schedule missions and
promotes collaboration between drones. A modular cloud proxy server was developed;
it acts as a moderator between drones and users. Communication between drones, users
and the Dronemap Planner cloud is provided through the MAVLink protocol, which
is supported by commodity drones. To demonstrate the effective ness of Dronemap
Planner, we implemented and validated it using simulated and real MAVLink-enabled
drones, and deployed it on a public cloud server. Experimental results show that
Dronemap Planner is efficient in virtualizing the access to drones over the Internet, and
provides developers with appropriate APls to easily program drones’ applications.

ROSLink
The integration of robots with the Internet is nowadays an emerging trend, as new
form of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). This integration is crucially important to pro-
mote new types of cloud robotics applications where robots are virtualized, controlled
and monitored through the Internet. ROSLink, is a new protocol to integrate Robot
Operating System (ROS) enabled-robots with the IoT. The motivation behind ROSLink
is the lack of ROS functionality in monitoring and controlling robots through the Inter-
net. 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

9
 Approach

ROSLink Bridge
ROSLink
Message ROSLink
Message
ROS Master

ROSLink
Message
ROSLink ROSLink
Message
Cloud Proxy ROSLink Bridge

ROS Master

ROSLink
Message ROSLink
Message

ROSLink Bridge

ROS Master

Figure 4: ROSLink Approach

servers sharing similar limitations. Inspired from the MAVLink protocol, the proposed
ROSLink protocol defines a 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. ROSLink performance was tested on the cloud and was shown to be
efficient and reliable.

Dual mode for vehicular platoon safety: Simulation and formal

verification
In order to cope with uncertainties in a platoon, this paper proposes a reconfigurable
multi-agent architecture to address the platoon safety problem by handling two modes:
the normal mode and the degraded mode. At this stage of research, the normal mode is
characterized by the interaction between agents over a Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) com-
munication network while the degraded mode simply involves sensors for a local percep-
tion. The switching from the normal mode to the degraded one is triggered when the
communication quality is considered not fully reliable. A PID (Proportional Integral
Derivative) controller is proposed to regulate the inter-vehicle distance and orientation.
Two models are proposed in this paper: in the first one, the management operations
such as splitting and joining are set up while the second is mainly modeled to assess
the implemented controller quality. In this paper, the safety of a platoon is represented
by the quality of tracking and the inter-vehicle distance. The mentioned features are
assessed for both modes through a formal verification using the Uppaal software. We
prove the efficiency of the proposed platoon model for several situations such as merging,

10
 Figure 5: DroneMap System Architectur

following or leaving the platoon by verifying different properties using the model check-
ing. The evaluation of the second model, simulated by the Webots software, proves the
impact of the number of vehicles on the platoon performance and the vehicle tracking
quality. We conclude that when the platoon reaches a certain number of vehicles, the
safety criterion is no more reliable.

Move and Improve: a Market-Based Mechanism for the Mul-

tiple Depot Multiple Travelling Salesmen Problem
Consider the problem of having a team of cooperative and autonomous robots to re-
peatedly visit a set of target locations and return back to their initial locations. This
problem is known as multi-robot patrolling and can be cast to the multiple depot mul-
tiple traveling salesman problem (MD-MTSP), which applies to several mobile robots
applications. As an NP-Hard problem, centralized approaches using meta-heuristic
search are typically used to solve it, but such approaches are computation-intensive and
cannot effectively deal with the dynamic nature of the system. This paper provides a
distributed solution based on a market-based approach, called Move-and-Improve. It
involves the cooperation of the robots to incrementally allocate targets and remove
possible overlap. The concept is simple: in each step, a robot moves and attempts to
improve its solution while communicating with its neighbors. Our approach consists
of four main phases: (1) initial target allocation, (2) tour construction, (3) negotia-
tion of conflicting targets, (4) solution improvement. To validate the efficiency of the
Move-and-Improve distributed algorithm, we first conducted extensive simulations us-
ing Webots and evaluated its performance in terms of total traveled distance, maximum
tour length, and ratio of overlapped targets, under different settings. We also demon-
strated through MATLAB simulations the benefits of using our decentralized approach

11
 ROSLink
Cloud

ROSLink ROSLink ROSLink

Client Proxy Bridge
Control,
ROSLink
Monitor ROS
Cloud
App
drivers

Robot HW

Figure 6: ROSLink Architecture

as compared to a centralized Genetic Algorithm approach to solve the MD-MTSP prob-

lem. Finally, we implemented Move-and-Improve using ROS and deployed it on real
robots.

Design and performance analysis of global path planning tech-

niques for autonomous mobile robots in grid environments
This article presents the results of the 2-year iroboapp research project that aims at
devising path planning algorithms for large grid maps with much faster execution times
while tolerating very small slacks with respect to the optimal path. We investigated
both exact and heuristic methods. We contributed with the design, analysis, evaluation,
implementation and experimentation of several algorithms for grid map path planning
for both exact and heuristic methods. We also designed an innovative algorithm called
relaxed A-star that has linear complexity with relaxed constraints, which provides near-
optimal solutions with an extremely reduced execution time as compared to A-star. We
evaluated the performance of the different algorithms and concluded that relaxed A-star
is the best path planner as it provides a good trade-off among all the metrics, but we
noticed that heuristic methods have good features that can be exploited to improve the
solution of the relaxed exact method. This led us to design new hybrid algorithms that
combine our relaxed A-star with heuristic methods which improve the solution quality
of relaxed A-star at the cost of slightly higher execution time, while remaining much
faster than A* for large-scale problems. Finally, we demonstrate how to integrate the
relaxed A-star algorithm in the robot operating system as a global path planner and
show that it outperforms its default path planner with an execution time 38% faster
on average.

12
Global robot Path Planning using GA for Large Grid Maps:
Modelling, Performance and Experimentation
In this paper, the eciency of genetic algorithm (GA) approach to address the problem of
global path planning for mobile robots in large-scale grid environments is revisited and
assessed. First, an ecient GA path planner to nd an (or near) optimal path in a grid map
is proposed. In particular, large maps instances are considered in this work, as small
maps are easy to address by typical linear-time exact algorithms, in contrast to large
maps, which require more intensive computations. The operators of the GA planner
were carefully designed for optimizing the search process. Also, extensive simulations
to evaluate the GA planner are conducted, and its performance is compared to that
of the A algorithm considered as benchmarking reference. We found out that the GA
planner can nd optimal solutions in the same way as A in large grid maps in most cases,
but A is faster than the GA. This is because GA is not a constructive path planner and
heavily relies on initial population to explore the space of solutions in contrast to A that
builds its solution progressively towards the target. It was concluded that, although
GA can provide an alternative to A technique, it is likely that they are not ecient
enough to beat exact methods such as A when used with a consistent heuristic. The
GA planner is integrated in the global path planning modules of the Robot Operating
System (ROS), its feasibility is demonstrated, and its performance is compared against
the default ROS planner.

On Power Consumption Profiles for Data Intensive Workloads

in Virtualized Hadoop Clusters
Although reduction in operating costs remains to be a key motivation for migration to
Cloud environments, Power consumption is a big concern for data centers and cloud
service providers. Many big data applications execute on Hadoop MapReduce frame-
work for processing large workloads. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between
energy consumption and workload running on Hadoop clusters using multiple virtual
machines. We characterize power consumption profiles for various data intensive work-
loads and correlate these to quality of service (QoS) metrics such as job execution time.
Based on experiments, we ascertain that power consumption profiles for big data appli-
cations can be used to optimize energy efficiency in data centers. We infer that these
profiles can be used by Cloud service providers and consumers to specify green metrics
in Service Level Agreements (SLA).

13
11 Publications
1 Book
[1] Anis Koubaa, ed. Robot Operating System (ROS): The Complete Reference (Vol-
ume 2). Vol. 707. Studies in Computational Intelligence. Cham: Springer, 2017.
isbn: 978-3-319-54926-2. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-54927-9.

8 ISI JOURNALS
[1] Oussama Karoui, Mohamed Khalgui, Anis Koubaa, Emna Guerfala, Zhiwu Li, and
Eduardo Tovar. “Dual mode for vehicular platoon safety: Simulation and formal
verification”. In: Information Sciences 402 (2017), pp. 216–232. issn: 0020-0255.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2017.03.016. url: http://www.
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020025517305959.
[2] Anis Koubaa, Omar Cheikhrouhou, Hachemi Bennaceur, Mohamed-Foued Sriti,
Yasir Javed, and Adel Ammar. “Move and Improve: a Market-Based Mechanism
for the Multiple Depot Multiple Travelling Salesmen Problem”. In: Journal of
Intelligent & Robotic Systems 85.2 (Feb. 2017), pp. 307–330. issn: 1573-0409. doi:
10.1007/s10846-016-0400-x. url: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-016-
0400-x.
[3] Imen Chaari, Anis Koubaa, Hachemi Bennaceur, Adel Ammar, Maram Alajlan,
and Habib Youssef. “Design and performance analysis of global path planning tech-
niques for autonomous mobile robots in grid environments”. In: International Jour-
nal of Advanced Robotic Systems 14.2 (2017), p. 1729881416663663. doi: 10.1177/
1729881416663663. url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1729881416663663.
[4] Anis Koubaa, Mohamed-Foued Sriti, Yasir Javed, Maram Alajlan, Basit Qureshi,
Fatma Ellouze, and Abdelrahman Mahmoud. “MyBot: Cloud-Based Service Robot
using Service-Oriented Architecture”. In: Robotic Journal (2017).
[5] Stefano Tennina, Olfa Gaddour, Anis Koubaa, Fernando Royo, Mario Alves, and
Mohamed Abid. “Z-Monitor: A protocol analyzer for IEEE 802.15.4-based low-
power wireless networks”. In: Computer Networks 95 (2016), pp. 77–96. issn: 1389-
1286. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2015.12.002. url: http:
//www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389128615004788.
[6] Rihab Chaari, Fatma Ellouze, Anis Koubaa, Basit Qureshi, Nuno Pereira, Habib
Youssef, and Eduardo Tovar. “Cyber-physical systems clouds: A survey”. In: Com-
puter Networks 108 (2016), pp. 260–278. issn: 1389-1286. doi: http://dx.doi.
org/10.1016/j.comnet.2016.08.017. url: http://www.sciencedirect.com/
science/article/pii/S1389128616302699.

14
[7] Maram Alajlan, Imen Chaari, Anis Koubaa, Hachemi Bennaceur, Adel Ammar,
and Habib Youssef. “Global robot Path Planning using GA for Large Grid Maps:
Modelling, Performance and Experimentation”. In: International Journal of Robotics
and Automation 31.6 (2016), pp. 1–12.
[8] Adel Ammar, Hachemi Bennaceur, Imen Châari, Anis Kouba, and Maram Alajlan.
“Relaxed Dijkstra and A* with linear complexity for robot path planning problems
in large-scale grid environments”. In: Soft Computing 20.10 (Oct. 2016), pp. 4149–
4171. issn: 1433-7479. doi: 10.1007/s00500-015-1750-1. url: https://doi.
org/10.1007/s00500-015-1750-1.

7 CONFERENCES
[1] A. Koubaa, B. Qureshi, M. F. Sriti, Y. Javed, and E. Tovar. “A service-oriented
Cloud-based management system for the Internet-of-Drones”. In: 2017 IEEE Inter-
national Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC).
Apr. 2017, pp. 329–335. doi: 10.1109/ICARSC.2017.7964096.
[2] Basit Qureshi, Sultan Alwehaibi, and Anis Koubaa. “On Power Consumption Pro-
files for Data Intensive Workloads in Virtualized Hadoop Clusters”. In: 2017 IEEE
International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM). 2017.
[3] Anis Zarrad, Anis Koubaa, and Omar Cheikhrouhou. “Poster: 3D Virtual Disaster
Management Environment Using Wireless Sensor Networks”. In: Proceedings of
the 2016 International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks.
EWSN ’16. Graz, Austria: Junction Publishing, 2016, pp. 267–268. isbn: 978-0-
9949886-0-7. url: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2893711.2893766.
[4] O. Cheikhrouhou, A. Koubaa, and A. Zaard. “Analytical Hierarchy Process based
Multi-objective Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem”. In: 2016 International Con-
ference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC). May 2016,
pp. 130–136. doi: 10.1109/ICARSC.2016.26.
[5] S. Trigui, A. Koubaa, O. Cheikhrouhou, B. Qureshi, and H. Youssef. “A Clustering
Market-Based Approach for Multi-robot Emergency Response Applications”. In:
2016 International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions
(ICARSC). May 2016, pp. 137–143. doi: 10.1109/ICARSC.2016.14.
[6] A. Koubaa, M. F. Sriti, Y. Javed, M. Alajlan, B. Qureshi, F. Ellouze, and A. Mah-
moud. “Turtlebot at Office: A Service-Oriented Software Architecture for Per-
sonal Assistant Robots Using ROS”. In: 2016 International Conference on Au-
tonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC). May 2016, pp. 270–276.
doi: 10.1109/ICARSC.2016.66.

15
[7] H. Kurunathan, R. Severino, A. Koubaa, and E. Tovar. “Poster Abstract: Towards
Worst-Case Bounds Analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4e”. In: 2016 IEEE Real-Time
and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS). Apr. 2016, pp. 1–
1.

2 BOOK CHAPTERS
[1] Anis Koubaa, Maram Alajlan, and Basit Qureshi. “ROSLink: Bridging ROS with
the Internet-of-Things for Cloud Robotics”. In: Robot Operating System (ROS):
The Complete Reference (Volume 2). Cham: Springer International Publishing,
2017, pp. 265–283. isbn: 978-3-319-54927-9.
[2] Anis Koubaa. “Service-Oriented Robotics Computing”. In: Encyclopedia of Robotics.
Ed. by Marcelo H. Ang Jr., Oussama Khatib, and Bruno Siciliano. 2017.

12 Experiments
On April 4, 2017, Dr. Anis Koubaa performed new flight tests with students Taha
Khursheed and Belal Kawaf with real drones on Football field, Both Dronema Planner
and follower applications were successfuly demonstrated. Flights tests are in prepara-
tion for the FreeBots competition in Portual scheduled for April 30, 2017. Videos are
available at: https://goo.gl/iS40I6 and https://goo.gl/1Lycl5

Figure 7: Flight test

13 Future plan
• Representative of Gaitech company selling TB3 and Gapter

16
 • More training events

• Four research projects with KACST

• Books and publications

• EDX learning platform

• Government Chinese Project

14 Requirements
• Lab space and a private office at the new building because the research activities
of the lab are related to teach and students activities and being in the old building
might not be practical and productive.

• Possibility of business VISA for short-term internship at PSU.

17

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