A distributed mobile robot software application infrastructure is developed, improving integration and leverage between projects in a research environment. The resulting design includes a three layer CORBA based, service broker application architecture. A reference implementation and tests on B21r, LEGO Mindstorm and Khepera robots demonstrate the feasibility of the design.
The distributed mobile robot software application will improve the integration, particularly in a diverse university or laboratory research environment with different robots, operating systems, programming languages, and researchers. It adopts a CORBA based application architecture comprising three layers: application, infrastructure services, and middleware.
The application layer contains component developed by researchers, which are registered as services. The infrastructure services layer is a broker, following the CORBA Trader specification. The broker provides the protocol between services as well as query facilities for clients. The middleware layer handles communications between services.
CORBA allows a diverse range of languages and operating platforms. Our reference implementation includes robot services for the B21r, Khepera, and LEGO Mindstorm robots, the service broker, a remote robot control application, plus a web enabled version. Real time facilities are not yet included. Although there are issues to overcome, ORB compatibility and performance in a busy network, the application infrastructure provides a good framework for researchers.
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