RoboFrame - A Modular Software Framework for Lightweight Autonomous Robots

Abstract

Abstract — The complexity of autonomous robot systems has increased dramatically in recent years. Besides an increased variety of robots, sensors, actuators, onboard computers and intelligent algorithms, the architecture of the software has gained crucial relevance with respect to the efficiency for adopting a robotic system to new hardware, new software or new tasks. For evaluation of different robot architectures and middleware not only a set of set of evaluation criterias is required. At least equally important for an evaluation is to define a representative set of the boundary conditions, i.e., different types of robots, tasks and scenarios as well as robot programmers. How the different criteria of an evaluation will be weighted also depends on these boundary conditions. To address the special needs of heterogeneous teams of autonomous lightweight robots, the software framework RoboFrame has been developed. Its main characteristics are platform independency, modularity and high efficiency. It is also bundled with a library of common components for robot control software, which provides much more support to the robot programmer than a robot middleware system alone. I.