P2P Communication for the Future of Robotics: Robot Agent 0.0.7 Release

At Merklebot, we create data management and development tools for robotics fleet operators. We believe that it’s quite possible we’ll have 10B+ robots in the next 15 years and we are building a robust, scalable and secure infrastructure and communication stack to make this vision a reality.

What is Robot Agent?

Several months ago, we rolled out the Digital Black Box, a service to back up data from robots including logs, camera feeds and point clouds, in a secure and affordable decentralized storage network — Filecoin. Digital Black Box consists of:

1. Robot Agent running at the edge

2. Merklebot platform that powers cloud connections

The first version of the Robot Agent was just collecting and backing up data from the edge devices. Later we built the Merklebot Platform and added a capability to deploy Docker containers to the edge devices with the Agent running on them.

Robot Agent 0.0.7

1. 👀 mDNS autodiscovery of other robots in the network
2. 🤖↔🤖 Libp2p messaging between robots

Today we are announcing a new release of Robot Agent 0.0.7 with Libp2p communication module. The latest version of the Robot Agent is now equipped with Libp2p peer discovery, addressing and message sending. You can set up networks with flexible topology and not worry about configuring the communication stack every time you change location or other parameters. It is available to the public on our Github.

With Robot Agent 0.0.7 installed, devices can automatically find other devices with the Agent and pass information (state, events) to each other without accessing the central server. The Agent can power device-to-device communications without internet connection. It is fully open source with an MIT license, and you can use this tool for your needs as you see fit.

Merklebot Platform

Merklebot platform allows for a centralized rollout of the Robot Agents to a fleet of devices, providing a secure and easy way to manage a wide range of devices such as robots, sensors, equipment and other machinery. Deploy code and Docker containers on your whole fleet of Robot Agents and manage their data.

Without Merklebot:

1. Connect to robot
2. Add robot to vpn network or another way to bypass NAT traversal
3. 🧑‍💻 Write you code
4. Connect to robot via ssh
5. ⏳ git pull
6. ⏳ docker build && run my-best-code
7. ⏳ cat robot.logs
8. ⏳ scp to get data(videos from cameras etc)
9. ⏳ save it somewhere to aggregate

With Merklebot:

1. Connect to robot
2. Run install.sh
3. 🧑‍💻Write your code
4. 🚀One click on platform or API call
5. 😎See logs, videos and other data on the platform

What’s next

Merklebot’s team is currently working on a new set of features that will continue to enhance open-source agent’s capabilities and add more utility to the Merklebot platform.

• Improved CLI tools (common line interface) for the agent. Bypass SSH, deliver configuration updates and manage agents without editing them on the device. This is currently enabled on Merklebot Platform, but we are excited to make it open-source!
• Integration with open-source data management and visualization tools. Collect and store logs, run data jobs, and build visualizations.
• Integration with CI/CD (continuous integration continuous deployment) tools, like Jenkins. Automatically install new software releases on the devices.

Check out our new agent! We’d love to hear your feedback.

And if you need to manage a fleet of devices, get started with Merklebot Platform.