Qafka Robotics
A vision of Qafka Robotics is to bridge the gap between business and robotics. The aim of the current project is to create Automatic Twistlock Handling (ATHL) technology in port terminals.
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A vision of Qafka Robotics is to bridge the gap between business and robotics. The aim of the current project is to create Automatic Twistlock Handling (ATHL) technology in port terminals.
Last updated
In September 2021, I participated in a selective program called Robotics minor organized by Robohouse, TU Delft and Delft Robotics Institute. Here, I was assigned to the project by Siemens to solve twist-lock handling problem.
In the Robotics minor, we used ROS Noetic which is the older version of the current ROS2. We decided to migrate to ROS2 since it is more tailored towards the industry and offers more updated functionalities, which are useful for our implementation.
ROS2 is a an open-source framework for robot development. ROS System Designs are inspired from designs in distributed systems, where each parts (nodes) interact (topics/services) with each other to produce the desired behavior of the system. You can imagine a system as a graph: the nodes are the graph vertices and the topics are the graph edges. An example of such graphs can be seen below (Image 1.1).
In other words, you can also observe that this looks like a well-known pub-sub design pattern. For exampre, the driver_node subscribe to /cmd_vel topic (with a type geometry_msgs/Twist).
Easy to understand: For me, it is easier for me to explain how the system works for other engineering fields. With semantically meaningful namings, the pub-sub is not a hard concept to grasp in my opinion.
Substitution: Each node in the system could be independently modified or replaced and not affect the rest of the system, which relates to a principle of moduler design.
Reusability: A bit related to the previous point, here you can take some nodes and import it to the other system. This way you can reuse some parts of your system in another system.
