Distributed Control Lab

Abstract

The Distributed Control Lab (DCL)[10] provides an open infrastructure for conducting robotics and control experiments from the Internet. It is based on web service technologies and offers a wide range of frontend applications. Within the DCL environment we focus on safety mechanisms in order to prevent malicious code from damaging experimental equipment. This includes source code analysis, runtime observation and the dynamic replacement of faulty control algorithms. Within the paper we present an overview of our architecture and explain the implemented frontends in detail. We introduce the installed experiments and report our experiences from operation in the last years. In addition we will describe our latest integration of grid computing technologies, which allows the outsourcing of computing-intensive simulation tasks.