Development of an Open Software Platform for Robotics Services

Abstract

We provide an overall description of our large-scale project on a robot software, called Open Platform for Robotic Services (OPRoS). Component-oriented design for robot software is employed to accommodate the open architecture of software. Basic structure and interfaces of the component are given and as real examples, several components for robotics applications are introduced. We also suggest a framework that supports communications among components and manages timers, events, faults and so on. The framework is designed so that it can be helpful for those who are not familiar with hardware. It is shown through an integrated developed environment(IDE) that all design procedure can be simplified and thus we can save much time and efforts developing a robot software. To make more stable SW, this project includes the scheme for evaluating and testing of the developed programs. The robot SW server with the global component repository is used for computation of some tasks requiring more computing power than that of the robot and the convenient discovery service of components.