ROS for the internet of things

iot

asked 2014-11-28 03:10:33 -0500

nashamri
33 ●1 ●3 ●5 http://www.nass3r.com/

Hello everyone! I'm new to ROS and I have a question.

I need to have data that mimic a typical home owner interactions with his smart gadgets at home. So I need to have lots of sensors installed in this virtual environment (e.g. on doors or light bulbs to detect when the owner open and close them, and maybe other sensors to detect temperature, humidity, etc..) and I want to manually control something to act like the home owner while he interacts with these smart gadgets and most importantly, I want to be able to log the data generated from these gadgets.

In a nutshell, a testbed for a typical home usage in the so called "Internet of Things" paradigm.

Can I build something like this using ROS or one of its tools? and how hard it will be?

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answered 2014-11-28 07:28:04 -0500

ahendrix

47576 ●179 ●367 ●662 http://namniart.com/

This would definitely be possible with ROS, and it would make a great, easy prototype, but ROS probably isn't suitable for a commercial IoT product.

ROS has some great features that will make prototyping easy:

Python API for quick scripts
Anonymous pub/sub and remapping for easy re-use of nodes
Existing packages like rosserial for hardware integration

But ROS also has some drawbacks that make it unsuitable for commercial deployment:

Requires a full Linux OS (Ubuntu)
Lots of dependencies; requires several GB of disk space to install.
Centralized ROS master needed for connection setup
Does not handle lossy or intermittent network connections well

I'm not familiar with the IoT frameworks, but one of them might be more suitable.

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Thanks ahendrix, I'm not interested in any sort of commercial deployment, it's only for research purposes. Also I don't care about the network reliability and it's OK to have the central master node. I just want to have a virtual smart home with lots of sensors to log the user interactions with them

nashamri ( 2014-11-28 08:45:57 -0500 )edit

Great! I just wanted to make sure that you and future users are aware of the limitations that ROS may have in this sort of setting.

ahendrix ( 2014-11-29 18:10:19 -0500 )edit

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answered 2014-11-28 10:02:46 -0500

corb
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Check out OpenHAB.org . This is a full open source Home Automation system. It has a very flexible framework with GUI and should give you what you want. I am currently working on a bridge between OpenHAB and ROS (they are both cleanly designed pub/sub systems so its pretty straightforward. This would have OpenHAB control all the home automation sensors and present information to ROS. This would allow you to do things like: OpenHAB detects motion or water leak and ROS dispatches a robot with camera. Or, if you have a Baxter and an IoT clothes dryer, the dryer will signal that the clothes are ready and Baxter would fold them.

The power of OpenHAB is that it has adapters that can talk to the zillions of different protocols currently roaming the IoT. OpenHAB is the guts of the Eclipse SmartHome project.

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Thanks corb, I'm not interested in real physical things and how to control them. I just want a tool that allows me to build virtual environment with virtual smart things. My goal is the data generated from these smart things. I want to build a system that intelligently adapts to the user behaviour.

nashamri ( 2014-11-28 12:10:47 -0500 )edit

OpenHAB has a demo mode that will display a GUI with on/off for switches, sliders for temperature, completely virtual. The config is a fairly simple text file. OpenHAB is a plug-in architecture so to just download the core is pretty quick and small.

corb ( 2014-11-28 12:39:16 -0500 )edit

Thanks corb, I'll check OpenHAB :)

nashamri ( 2014-12-02 02:47:17 -0500 )edit

Hi, @corb you have news about this integration of OpenHAB with ROS? Thanks.

Carlos Delfino ( 2018-12-17 15:29:11 -0500 )edit

@corb What do you think about rosjava? (Only supported in kentic). OpenHAB was written in Java. One of my thoughts was to make rosjava "better" so you can as example use the ROS Publisher and Subscriber and send informations to an ROS robot.

Another solution was maybe the mqtt_bridge. Because you can use MQTT inside OpenHAB.

Michdo93 ( 2020-12-04 18:26:03 -0500 )edit

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