Simulation is an essential tool for developing robotic systems; however it is computationally intensive and does not scale well, especially for multi-robot scenarios. In this paper we introduce daß – a system that facilitates distributable and scalable simulations of robotic applications. It overcomes many of the performance and quality limitations involved in common multi-robot simulation scenarios through horizontal scaling. Through extensive evaluation, we show that daß significantly outperforms the widely used Gazebo robotics simulator, and easily scales well beyond the current limitations with no significant loss in performance and simulation fidelity.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has received much attention from the research community in recent years. A significant part of the published work has studied the telecom-centric MEC architecture, which assumes that the computing resource is located at the edge of the mobile access network (e.g., the Evolved Packet Core or ePC), typically at the first aggregation level. Many of these studies make a silent assumption that the latency at this stage of the network is negligible. We show not only that this assumption is false, but that in some common cases the latency of the first aggregation stage dominates the end-to-end latency. We further show that common probing metrics can easily fail when used to select the service site for an application and discuss possible improvements to server-selection reliability.

We describe and evaluate a software-only implementation of a novel mechanism for accessing and streaming GPU-rendered content from the cloud to low-end user devices. The unique properties of our implementation enable the trivial cloud-deployment of graphics-intensive applications, even ones that were not originally intended to run in the cloud. We achieve this goal by creating virtual GPU nodes that appear to the application like hardware devices, but that do not incur the overhead of virtualization. The low-level access to the frame buffer maximizes the number of applications that work out-of-the-box without the system imposing any specific display manager or windowing system.

Programming autonomous systems can be challenging because many programming decisions must be made in real time and under stressful conditions, such as on a battle field, during a short communication window, or during a storm at sea. As such, new programming designs are needed to reflect these specific and extreme challenges.

We present a compression algorithm and a streaming protocol designed for streaming of computer-desktop graphics. The encoder has low memory requirements and can be broken into a large number of independent contexts with a high degree of data locality. The encoder also uses only simple arithmetic, which makes it amenable to hardware or highly parallel software implementation. The decoder is trivial and requires no memory, which makes it suitable for use on devices with limited computing capabilities. The streaming protocol runs over UDP and has its own unique error recovery mechanism specifically designed for interactive applications.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are an indispensable tool for marine scientists to study the world's oceans. The Slocum glider is a buoyancy driven AUV designed for missions that can last weeks or even months. Although successful, its hardware and layered control architecture is rather limited and difficult to program. Due to limits in its hardware and software infrastructure, the Slocum glider is not able to change its behavior based on sensor readings while underwater. In this paper, we discuss a new programming architecture for AUVs like the Slocum. We present a new model that allows marine scientists to express AUV missions at a higher level of abstraction, leaving low-level software and hardware details to the compiler and runtime system. The Slocum glider is used as an illustration of how our programming architecture can be implemented within an existing system. The Slocum's new framework consists of an event driven, finite state machine model, a corresponding compiler and runtime system, and a hardware platform that interacts with the glider's existing hardware infrastructure. The new programming architecture is able to implement changes in glider behavior in response to sensor readings while submerged. This crucial capability will enable advanced glider behaviors such as underwater communication and swarming. Experimental results based on simulation and actual glider deployments off the coast of New Jersey show the expressiveness and effectiveness of our prototype implementation.