Qbotics Labs

1. What are Qbotics lab main skills and capabilities in the field of robot programming? How are the programs developed?

Qbotics Labs is a company focusing on robot programming based on Robot Operating System, Open-CV and Point Cloud Library (PCL). We mainly depend on standard ROS packages and libraries to create robotics applications for the clients. We also develop new packages and libraries for company purpose, and some packages release to the public. We also provide education in the field of robotics programming through books and online courses.

2. Qbotics dreams to make a world where robots and humans work side by side and resolve problems. How far did Qbotics successfully accomplish this?

One of the major areas that need to explore more in robotics is the robotics software. We can extend the robot capabilities by writing intelligent software to make the robot autonomous. Qbotics provide robotics software services and support to create intelligent robots that can work side and resolve problems. As of now, we could successfully automate some robotics products for startups, and we are still on the same path to accomplish this vision.

3. What is the Robot Operating System (ROS) in layman's terms?

The ROS is a software framework, which can be used to create computer programs to exchange data between two programs. In robotics, this mode of communication plays an important role. This communication enables us to handle various sensor data, and motors commands of the robot and those programs can exchange data with each other. ROS provides easy functions to create those programs, which can able to communicate and exchange data with each other.

4. What factors are driving ROS (Robotics Operating System) market?

The software is the powerful medium to implement various capabilities of a robot. ROS is one of the popular software frameworks available for creating robotics software. It is open-source, and we can do any customization on it. Naturally, these factors will build a developer community for ROS. Companies are also taking ROS to their product, which creates job opportunities in ROS. Now- a-days, most of the robotics companies, research centers, and universities are preferring ROS for writing robotics application. So naturally, it has a good market scope.

5. What are the strengths and weaknesses of a ROS (Robot Operating System)? Can it be the worldwide standard for robotics?

The strength of this platform is that it has great development community across the globe. ROS provides functions to prototype a robotics application quickly. It is an open-source and platform, so anyone customizes ROS. It is also FREE of cost. The weakness is, it is not very secure, not real-time and cannot embed in microcontrollers. The ROS-2 version is solving most of the issues.

It may become a standard in robotics programming, but still, there are a lot of works to do for the standardization.

6. What is the scope of ROS - Robot Operating System in India?

The statistics of ROS shows, India is the top 5 country which uses the ROS platform wiki.ros.org

http://download.ros.org/downloads/metrics/metrics-report-2017-07.pdf

Personally, I see a lot of scope in India.

7. What are the best applications for developing robots?

Developing a robot involves a lot of frameworks. Commonly, we are using ROS, Open-CV, and PCL as the main platform to program, Gazebo and V-REP simulators for creating robotics simulations. We are using C++ and Python for programming

8. What is Realistic Robot Simulation (RRS)? What is the best software for robotics simulation?

The RRS aim to achieve high accuracy in simulating the industrial controllers. There are simulators from Visual components and RoboDK. We are commonly using V-REP.

9. How is robot perception used to control robot movement in autonomous robots?

Perception is an integral part of bringing autonomous behavior in robots. The robot may have a camera, LIDAR to get 2D image of the environment and 3D point cloud data of the surrounding. It can help the robot to take the decision and autonomously navigate the surrounding.

10. In the context of robotics, if we define planning as "finding a sequence of actions to achieve a given goal", does autonomous navigation and mapping of an unknown environment count as planning or not?

The goal-based approach is also there in Autonomous navigation. The robot can achieve the goal autonomously by avoiding the obstacle with the help of planners. A planner is a subsystem of autonomous navigation, which helps to compute the optimum path from current robot position to the goal position.

11. What are the challenges in developing a simulation tool for autonomous driving vehicles?

Creating the exact characteristics and rules of the real world is quite challenging. The dataset collected from the simulator is using for training the model of the real autonomous driving vehicles, so the simulator tool should have an excellent simulation environment which is very similar to the real world and should be capable of creating the real-world dataset.

12. What are the advantages & disadvantages of artificial intelligence?

In every technology, there are pros and cons. The main advantage of using AI is the possibility of automation. We can automate a lot of mundane jobs and save a lot of resources. The disadvantage is the ambiguities in decision making by AI agents. It is not easy to predict the output from a real AI agent. For example, if an autonomous car, take a wrong decision, it can crash. We can test all the cases, and even the test result can vary in each condition.