Introduction

Summary

This page introduces the main concepts and parts of rerobots.

Workspaces

A workspace is a collection of methods and materials for experiments with hardware. Note that "experiments" is not only for basic or applied research, but it is also for routine engineering activities like CI testing.

Conceptually, there are three levels of refinement. A workspace type is the workspace in terms of essential features, such as the models of hardware and the number of robots.

A workspace deployment is a physical realization of a workspace type, where parameters from the type take particular values like IP address or brand of a range finder. This term is sometimes abbreviated as wdeployment.

An instance of a workspace corresponds to usage of a deployment by a user. Ideally, each instance of a deployment is identical except for changes of user-defined parameters where available. Practically, there may be small differences.

Instances

The instance lifecycle is shown in the following diagram:

Instantiating always begins at INIT. It is rare but possible that an error will occur during INIT that causes the instance to be marked as INIT_FAIL. If initialization succeeds, the instance becomes READY and usage time measurement begins for purposes such as billing. When the user is done, she can terminate the instance.

In the case of INIT_FAIL, you can contact a rerobots employee for assistance, or you can try to start a new instance again. Internal rerobots logging will automatically save this event for further investigation later.

Kinds of Connection

To connect to an instance, there are several options available now, and more are under development. The best choice depends on a variety of factors, including some that rerobots cannot control; e.g., your geographic location relative to workspace deployments, whether you will operate the robots interactively (in real-time) or upload tests and run them in batch, the kind of communications middleware you use on the robots.

Available kinds of connection:

1. sshtun: ssh to a public IP address and port number.
2. openvpn: create OpenVPN server and install client certificates on instance hosts.

Keys can be generated as needed per instance, or you can upload keys for reuse.

API Tokens

Besides the dashboard at rerobots.net, rerobots has an API. An API token is a string that provides authentication and authorization for API requests. Users manage their API tokens at rerobots.net/tokens. Learn more by reading the guides about API tokens, such as how to make and revoke API tokens.

hardshare

The part of rerobots that facilitates users sharing their own hardware with others is named hardshare. These workspaces are available through the same interfaces as devices that are maintained by rerobots the company.

However, properties like uptime and calibration depend on the owners. The owner decides who is permitted to access their hardware, and they decide how add-on features like VNC should work in their specific case. In practice, this is not a problem because the users and owners of devices through hardshare are typically trusted.

In rerobots, devices shared through hardshare are always given the workspace type user_provided. Every workspace with type other than user_provided is maintained professionally by rerobots, e.g., fixed_misty2.

If you are interested in sharing your hardware, please read the Introduction of the hardshare manual. The source code of the hardshare client is at https://github.com/rerobots/hardshare.