A middleware based control architecture for modular robot systems

Robot technology has been widely used in industrial production and daily life. Unfortunately, due to the uncertainty of the environment and the diversity of functions, the complexity of the robot software is growing dramatically, in which a lot of repetitive works are done. To solve this problem, the modularization of robots and robot middleware has been proposed. From the perspective of modularization, interoperability, scalability and ease-of-use, this paper proposes a loose-coupled, service-oriented modular robot middleware (MoRoM) architecture. In this architecture, we define the standard interface to encapsulate services each functional component provides, realize system automatic configuration (Plug and Play), and provide a message notification mechanism as well as program frameworks. To verify the proposed middleware, we implement it using ACE-TAO, which is a real-time CORBA implementation, and test it in a modular robot system. The test shows that this architecture is suitable for improving reusability, interoperability and scalability of robot software.