Ortelio Ltd

Address: Coventry University Technology Park Puma way, CV1 2TT UK

Contact: Hervé Tsin phone: +44 7857087170 email: info@ortelio.co.uk www.robotics.ortelio.co.uk

Year of foundation: 2011

Number of employees: 11

Keywords:

cloud, AI, artificial intelligence, cloud robotics, service robotics, software, software development, assistive robotics, collaborative robotics, human robot interaction, robotic app store, rapp store

Company profile:

Ortelio Ltd is a research focused company, working on cloud robotics. We are developing applications that give robots intelligence to take over human tasks.
We work together with robot manufacturers and user groups, to co-create solutions with a great potential to enter the market. We believe in open innovation, user and citizen engagement, and participatory action research. We strive to identify concrete value propositions for specific target groups, and build innovative solutions that turn value into revenues.
We have developed a cloud-based platform for distributed execution of robotic software and robot controllers. This is a three-tier system using a ROS-based cloud, a robot API/SDK, and a robotic application store for distribution and execution of apps on Linux-based robots. The platform also enables different types of robots to communicate and exchange information, and thus to learn from each other.
Currently our applications target social inclusion for disadvantaged users, and part of a Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment for the elderly. However, the application domains for the cloud platform are not limited to those aforementioned. Our solution can be used in various other domains and fields.

Products and services:

The Robotic Applications Platform (RAPP) is a 3-tier system, aspiring to support all Unix-based Robots, wrap around existing ROS functionality, and provide APIs in C++, JavaScript and Python. Furthermore, the platform enables different robots to share information and gain knowledge.

a) Process Delegation

Delegating processes is the first tier in the RAPP platform. Computer Vision, Speech-to-Text, Ontology and Knowledge sharing, environment mapping and sharing, etc, can be performed on the cloud, freeing up resources on the robot. The platform doesn’t necessarily have to be far away from the robot; it may be near the deployment area, or on board your robot.

b) Distributed Controllers

The second tier is using distributed robot controllers for your applications. You can develop part of an application that will execute on-board the robot (using the native OS and SDK) and another part will execute as a process on the cloud platform. A feature-rich API/SDK means that you don’t have to deal with deploying, installing, setting and configuring every nut and bolt of a complex system where many things can go wrong; we’ve already done this for you. We hide the low-level functionality and some of the mid-level functionality (e.g., specific algorithms) and provide a high-level interface, so that you may use complex algorithms right away.

c) Robotic Applications Store

The third tier is re-usability of robotic Apps (rApps), as open-source free software, or as proprietary non-free software (it is up to you to decide). If you develop a rApp, we will package it, and redistribute it for you. You may write robot-specific RApps, or general and abstract RApps which are platform-agnostic. Distributed rAPPs running partially on the platform and partially on the Robot are an added bonus.

d) Internet or Robots and knowledge sharing

We support knowledge sharing via the cloud. Using RAPP enriches your applications because objects, faces, sounds, voices, locations, and many other things, can be shared across different robots (only if you wish too, we respect privacy!) enabling cooperation of robots in a novel manner.