Remote Object Control Interface of Robotic

An actuators, sensors, microprocessors and wireless networks become cheaper and more ubiquitous it has become increasingly attractive to consider employing teams of small robots to tackle various manipulations and sensing tasks. In order to exploit the full capabilities of these teams, we need to develop effective methods and models for programming distribute ensembles of actuators and sensors.

Application for distributed dynamic robotic teams require a different programming model than the one employed for most applications of traditional robotic. In the traditional model, the programmer is faced with the task of developing software for a single processor interacting with a prescribed set of actuators and sensors. She or he can assume typically that the configuration of the system goal is completely specified before the first line of code written. When developing code for multi robot dynamic teams, we must account for the fact that the type and number of robots available at runtime can not be predicted. We expect to operate in environment where robots will be removed and added continuously and unpredictably. It is expected an environment where the robots will have heterogeneous capabilities; for instance, some may be equipped with camera system, others with range sensors or specialized actuators, some agents may be stationary while others may offer specialized computational resources. This implies that the program must be able to identify and marshal all of the required resources to carry out the specified task automatically.

Remote Objects Control Interface (ROCI), objected oriented, a self describing, strongly typed programming framework that allows the development of robust applications for dynamic multi robot teams. The ROCI building blocks applications are self contained, reusable modules. Fundamentally, a module encapsulates a process which acts on data available on the module’s inputs and presents its result as outputs. Complex tasks can be built connecting inputs and outputs of specific modules.