Nicolas Small

Component-based Orchestration of Dynamic IaaS Applications

Orchestration tools for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments facilitate the deployment and management of cloud-based applications by automating the instantiation of virtual resources and configuration of software packages. While contemporary tools support the deployment of predefined applications, they lack internal support for taking care of changes in application designs. Dealing with this application dynamism in a timely manner requires new development and management techniques. This paper proposes a component-based approach that captures the entire design and runtime management cycle of IaaS applications. First, a component model is introduced that represents virtual computational resources as components and externalises control over their application logic. This model is then applied in a component framework that enables the rapid design of verified applications, and features additional support for the pre-provisioning of generic infrastructure and late configuration of application components. To showcase the capabilities of this approach, it is applied to an elastic media distribution use case.

Opportunities for Enhanced Robot Control along the Adjustable Autonomy Scale

As we move along the scale of adjustable autonomy for the control of robots from direct teleoperation at one extreme to full automation at the other, several opportunities for improvement in control quality, user feedback and machine learning suggest themselves. We describe three experiments, in telerobotics, the provision of situational awareness, and the acquisition of knowledge for automation from the human operator, and explain our concept of explicit, assigned responsibility as an organising principle for flexible work-sharing between humans and robots. A novel design for an interface based on this principle is outlined.

Selective Jamming of LoRaWAN using Commodity Hardware

Long range, low power networks are rapidly gaining acceptance in the Internet of Things (IoT) due to their ability to economically support long-range sensing and control applications while providing multi-year battery life. LoRa is a key example of this new class of network and is being deployed at large scale in several countries worldwide. As these networks move out of the lab and into the real world, they expose a large cyber-physical attack surface. Securing these networks is therefore both critical and urgent. This paper highlights security issues in LoRa and LoRaWAN that arise due to the choice of a robust but slow modulation type in the protocol. We exploit these issues to develop a suite of practical attacks based around selective jamming. These attacks are conducted and evaluated using commodity hardware. The paper concludes by suggesting a range of countermeasures that can be used to mitigate the attacks.

An assigned responsibility system for robotic teleoperation control

This paper proposes an architecture that explores a gap in the spectrum of existing strategies for robot control mode switching in adjustable autonomy. In situations where the environment is reasonably known and/or predictable, pre-planning these control changes could relieve robot operators of the additional task of deciding when and how to switch. Such a strategy provides a clear division of labour between the automation and the human operator(s) before the job even begins, allowing for individual responsibilities to be known ahead of time, limiting confusion and allowing rest breaks to be planned. Assigned Responsibility is a new form of adjustable autonomy-based teleoperation that allows the selective inclusion of automated control elements at key stages of a robot operation plan’s execution. Progression through these stages is controlled by automatic goal accomplishment tracking. An implementation is evaluated through engineering tests and a usability study, demonstrating the viability of this approach and offering insight into its potential applications.

Niflheim: End-to-End Middleware for Applications Across all Tiers of the IoT

The state-of-practice for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is deployment on specialised networks of embedded devices connected to a cloud backend. This paradigm is limited by the high latency and bandwidth incurred by communications with remote data servers and the inability to share specialised IoT infrastructure across applications. Efficiency can be improved by re-imagining all resources of the IoT infrastructure as micro-service hosting platforms. Applications decomposed as a set of services can then share IoT resources and run communicating modules closer together, tightening control loops and reducing latency and communications. This demo showcases Niflheim, a generic end-to-end middleware that provides modular microservice-based orchestration of applications on all resources across the tiers of the IoT, from IoT end-devices through gateways to the cloud. We demonstrate that this enables increased flexibility in application deployment and operations, while remaining efficient in terms of hardware and software requirements.

Field-Testing Astronaut Assistance Robots in Australian Outback [From the Field]

Reports on the field testing of robots technology. The trouble with field-testing robots is that we are taking complex machines out of the laboratory and into the dirt: natural, unstructured environments that cannot be easily characterized or measured. There they could be doing imperfectly characterized tasks. We expect robots to be behaviorally flexible so describing a typical task will generally underspecify actual usage. The machine design, task, and environment are not orthogonal factors either, since they might interact in complicated ways. As if all this was not enough, most field robots are still teleoperated, which adds the attendant problems of evaluating the human controller and interface. Published work in this area tends to focus on demonstrating the robot’s fitness for purpose based on specific requirements, often according to he contingencies of practical funding. Too often that commits the work to studies of performance on tasks that are not necessarily well understood, or even particularly well described, and to measurements within environments that cannot be duplicated.

Standardized Field Testing of Assistant Robots in a Mars-Like Environment

Controlled testing on standard tasks and within standard environments can provide meaningful performance comparisons between robots of heterogeneous design. But because they must perform practical tasks in unstructured, and therefore non-standard, environments, the benefits of this approach have barely begun to accrue for field robots. This work describes a desert trial of six student prototypes of astronaut-support robots using a set of standardized engineering tests developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), along with three operational tests in natural Mars-like terrain. The results suggest that standards developed for emergency response robots are also applicable to the astronaut support domain, yielding useful insights into the differences in capabilities between robots and real design improvements. The exercise shows the value of combining repeatable engineering tests with task-specific application-testing in the field.