Future Scope
The Ultimate end goal of the Nokia Bell Labs - MIT Project is to implement navigation, perception and path planning algorithms provided by ROS packages on the Omron-LD60 AMR. The real-life Omron AMR can be interacted with through a simple command line interface after over an SSH connection. This command line interface is known as ARCL (Advanced Robotics Command Language). Every Omron Robot has an onboard ARCL server that can be SSH'd into. Intermediate ROS nodes would be required to communicate with this ARCL Server and translate data to and from ROS messages. This has been implemented in the Omron APAC Repository.
Fig: Structure of ARCL-ROS interface from the Omron APAC Repository.
Implementing such an interface in simulation would be beneficial as it would allow almost complete re-usability between simulation and real-life. The same ROS network can be first developed in simulation and then used on the real-life robot. The code from the Omron_LD_ROS_package (The package mentioned above) can be used on the ROS side of the socket-to-socket interface. Plugins for the simulation environment of choice would have to be written. These plugins must communicate over sockets with the nodes from the Omron_LD_ROS_package. They must also interact with the robot model using simulator API.
