When deployed in the Pluto-Karratha Gas Plant (KGP), the production robot follows a predetermined path to capture data, including images, before re-docking at a ‘bot box’. “We bring all of those various components together through a CI/CD pipeline that is running in AWS services.” “We have a range of sensors and their device drivers, and ROS allows us to take the data from each of those sensors, bring them together with a range of algorithms such as localisation, obstacle detection, navigation, and also allows us to encode the images as video, for example, so that we can push that data up to the cloud,” he said.
Actual automatrons software#
Reid said that the widely-used open source robotics software framework, robot operating system (ROS), is the “glue that really brings the various parts of the robot together”.
“Once we’re happy the robot is performing as expected, then we’ll actually push that image to the production robot, which is sitting up in Karratha right now.” “We have a staging robot also out in the carpark, so once those packages have been built up into a new Docker image, we’ll pull it down onto the staging robot, and we’ll spend multiple days testing. “Once we’re happy with some of the code changes we’re making, we’ll be pushing them up to GitHub, where the CI/CD processes will kick off and build those changes into fresh Debian changes. “If we’re doing code development, then we’ll be doing that on a development robot out here in the lab,” he said on Wednesday.