Proposal of a REST-Based Architecture Server to Control a Robot

Abstract

Middle wares such as Player and ROS are commonly used in network robotics applications in order to provide networking capabilities and other functionalities such as remote control, vision, and others. On the other hand, they introduce more complexity to the system and decrease the system performance. For that reason, the use of web services, remote procedure calls, or messaging can be considered as an alternative to minimize the system complexity and design a more specific architecture that works at a certain performance. In fact, using simple HTTP connections to a robot can be very adequate in education and training or benchmarking applications where the students and researchers must concentrate on the design of the system and have an easy way to interact with the robot. This article proposes a REST architecture used over a HTTP connection to control a robot and exchanging information using xml. That provide great advantages, using standard HTTP calls enhances the availability of the system, and increases the debug facilities. The REST architecture has some characteristics that sometimes can be seen as an advantage and other times as an inconvenient, it is very simple and stateless. As opposite to SOAP and other RPC servers, REST is based on resources, not on operations. The REST philosophy aims to access URIs through HTTP protocol using CRUD operations. On the other hand, there are functionalities not supported as the need of callbacks which can be solved with different approaches (polling or non-REST callbacks). The research is based on the experience of constructing a server to control a 6-degree of freedom FANUC robot, letting the robot be accessed by simple HTTP connections using a REST-based architecture.