Robonomics 2018. Let’s sum up

Sergei Lonshakov
Robonomics Network by Airalab
6 min readSep 4, 2018

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To assemble and test the tent city, inside which is raised the purest p2p network, operating autonomously and at the same time capable of meeting the needs of the city of technocrats. That was our initial task. For 7 days of the summer school, together with the engineers who responded to our call, we linked: mesh topology, cjdns, ipfs, ipfs pubsub, Ethereum protocol and the Robonomics platform. By doing so we have obtained a network for servicing the smart city’s cyber-physical systems, to which 3 groups of participants connected their projects in the field of sensor networks, Industry 4.0 and mobile robotics. A small summary report is below.

4 days of engineering crash course in the Zhigulevskaya Valley Technopark

Day 1. On the first day we learned how to work with mesh-networks based on materials prepared by Sasha Krupenkin: We configured IPFS over WiFi-mesh. By the end of the first day, we learned to communicate using ipfs pubsub, which replaced Twitter for us (burn in hell for accessing the API by the support’s solution). With its help we shared the hash of the movie 13th floor (2.14 GB) for downloading by all participants. The first one who at the end of the day downloaded the film and opened the access to pizza to everyone else was Sasha Gryaznov.

Day 2. We continued to work on building a mesh network, as we faced the classic difficulties of building a decentralized network with a small number of participants and low peer affiliation, as well as a couple of non-trivial complications such as, for example, the incompatibility of some wifi adapters with work in ad-hoc mode. By lunchtime, we moved on to deploying the Ethereum local network and mining gas on our laptops.

After synchronizing and mining a small amount of ether with three or four participants of the school, we moved on to learning how to work with truffle and demonstrating the process of migrating with its help of Robonomics smart contracts to a new network. Educational material is also in Sasha’s blog: Configuring Ethereum over WiFi-mesh.

By evening, we breezed through the ROS and left its further studying in the form of homework.

Day 3 and 4. The remaining 2 days of engineering crash course we already spent in direct work with sensors, drones and a 3D printer to connect them to the network that we set up during the first two days.

Notes of the engineering crash course participant

Our colleague Masha prepared a series of materials in her Russian-language blog, I recommend you to read (soon all these materials will be translated into English as well):

Maybe there will be more notes of the participants, if I receive something, I’ll post it in this section.

Tourist village Lada under the dam

Days 5 & 6. The Kopylovo Peninsula begins at the base of the dam, which holds plenty of tons of water in the direction of Samara. As a result, we spent two days below the water level, but with beautiful sunny weather of the last weekend of summer 2018. Colleagues from Volga Engineering installed a solar panel to power the tent camp, we equipped the tents, it turned out like this:

Round tables went well, even though the schedule went to hell. Only those in the know and who were interested in the topic of each of the round tables gathered mostly. We communicated live and tried to agree on what can be done together this fall or next year.

What the Airalab team took to task after Robonomics 2018

  • More top quality documentation on the Robonomics platform. Vadim Manaenko will be involved in the reconfiguring of our DevOps learning center.
  • Make a selection of useful materials for training around the Robonomics, for example, working with ROS. Alisher, our industrial engineer, will add this publication to the documentation of Vadim.
  • Continue experiments to establish work in mesh-networks. Our second DevOps Pasha will give it a try.
  • Identify the functionality of the providers of Robonomics in a separate software, most likely, on Haskell. It will be written by Sasha Krupenkin.
  • Сonduct repeated load tests of Sasha Starostin in the local and main network until the moment of TGE XRT.
  • Our CreativeDep embarks on the path of an online store around Robonomics. It may already be launched by the New Year 2019.
  • We are thinking about conducting an online school in the winter of 2018/2019. If this project moves along, I’ll report it separately on the blog.

Based on the results of the round tables organized by the Airalab team:

  • Sasha Krupenkin will prepare a general material on mesh and set new tasks for experiments.
  • Sasha Kapitonov will prepare a list of tasks that the Drone-employee team implements in the nearest future.
  • Ivan Petrov will describe the arrangements and work plan with the administration of the city of Togliatti in the line of the experiments of the smart city.
  • The Evercity team will help as a partner in the work with the Asian investment market.

And a little bit of data:

Thank you!

Thanks to Alexei Voloshenko, our friend-musician, two beautiful bands — Empathy and Liberia — came to Robonomics 2018. Ivan Biryuk showed a show of drones in the sky over the Volga with the instrumental music in the background. Tea house — Matvey, thank you for taking on this task!

Special thanks to Ivan Podmasko, Anton Akentiev, of course, the guys from Parity, Pavel from TSU (water drone), our friends-journalists, who made it to our event this year, the Evercity team, who oversaw several tables. And to everyone who was with us

Several photos:

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