BRICS - Best Practice in Robotics

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Architectures, middleware, and interfaces

The objective of this activity is to identify complete robot control architectures or architectural subsystems and patterns, which are attractive for re-use by researchers and application developers. This activity will review and evaluate technologies and methods used in industries dealing with systems similar to robots (automotive, aviation, embedded systems development) and identify those technologies and methods from which robotics would benefit strongly. Outreach to the community is essential for this activity in order to guarantee that we capture all relevant technologies and both the extent and depth of the problems involved.

The following scientific and technical key issues will be addressed in this activity:

• Identification of best practice in architecture, middleware, and interfaces
  Past research has produced many good ideas, concepts, and even implementations for subsystems or particular aspects of robotics software development. The problem is that most of this work is not reusable. A first challenge of this activity is to make a thorough assessment of previous work and of the state-of-the-art. A second challenge is to define a coherent set of evaluation criteria, with measures and procedures for assessing them.
• Development of a software platform for robotics
  The first challenge is to deal with the heterogeneity of hardware devices. This heterogeneity can be dealt with by harmonising the interfaces to devices. A second challenge is to manage the complexities of communication and distributed systems. This is the core application domain of middleware systems. Middleware for the robotics domain should provide special support for handling soft and hard real-time requirements, communication facilities not supported by current middleware (CAN-bus etc.), and for advanced failure detection and failure handling capabilities to achieve robust autonomy. The third challenge is to handle the heterogeneity of the algorithmic approaches used in complex robotic applications. This requires the harmonisation of interfaces of different modules which provide functionality, such as mapping, SLAM, path planning, etc., as well as the harmonisation of data structures exchanged between modules. The fourth challenge is to provide appropriate support for tool chain integration, on all levels of the software platform, and both for the development environment as well as the runtime environment.
• Development of functional/control architecture workbench for robotics
  Designing and implementing suitable robot control architectures remains a largely open problem. This challenge can be met by developing a control architecture workbench for robotics, which should provide configurable blueprints for well-known robot control architectures, which have been re-factored to exploit the robust, state-of-the-art software technologies. The workbench should support re-use of architectural patterns.

Results:

• A. Shakhimardanov, N. Hochgeschwender, M, Reckhaus and G. K. Kraetzschmar. Analysis of software connectors in robotics. In Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '11), September 2011, San Francisco, CA, USA.
• F. Weisshardt. Care-O-bot-Research: Providing robust robotics hardware to an open source community. Schunk Expert Days, 24th February, 2011.
• M. Klotzbücher, P. Soetens and H. Bruyninckx. OROCOS RTT-Lua: an Execution Environment for building Real-time Robotic Domain Specific Languages. In Proc. of the Internation Workshop on Dynamic Languages (DYROS '10), November 2010, Darmstadt, Germany.
• G. K. Kraetzschmar, A. Shakhimardanov, J. Paulus, N. Hochgeschwender, M. Reckhaus. Specifications of Architectures, Modules, Modularity, and Interfaces for the BROCRE Software Platform and Robot Control Architecture Workbench. BRICS Deliverable D2.2, August 2010.
• F. Weisshardt, U. Reiser, C. Parlitz and A. Verl. Making High-Tech Service Robot Platforms Available. In K. Neumann (Ed.), R.D. Schraft (Chairman), K. Berns (Chairman). International Federation of Robotics: Joint International Conference of ISR/ROBOTIK2010. Munich, 7-9 June 2010, Berlin, Offenbach, VDE-Verlag, 2010, S. 1115-1120.
• R. Bischoff, T. Guhl, E. Prassler, W. Nowak, G. Kraetzschmar, H. Bruyninckx, P. Soetens, M. Haegele, A. Pott, P. Breedveld, J. Broenink, D. Brugali and N. Tomatis. BRICS − Best practice in robotics. In Proc. of the IFR International Symposium on Robotics (ISR 2010), June 2010, Munich, Germany.
• G. Schreiber, A. Stemmer, R. Bischoff. The Fast Research Interface for the KUKA Lightweight Robot. In Proc. of the IEEE ICRA 2010 Workshop on ICRA 2010 Workshop on Innovative Robot Control Architectures for Demanding (Research) Applications − How to Modify and Enhance Commercial Controllers. Anchorage, May 2010, p. 15-21.
• A. Shakhimardanov, J. Paulus, N. Hochgeschwender, M. Reckhaus, G. K. Kraetzschmar. Best Practice Assessment of Software Technologies for Robotics: BRICS Deliverable D2.1 available.