A Middleware for High-Speed Distributed Real-Time Robotic Applications.

Abstract

The development of modular and distributed real-time software systems — as they are common in the field of research and development of robotic manipulation control systems — can be greatly simplified by appropriate middleware concepts. This paper generically introduces the basic concepts of the middleware solution MiRPA (Middleware for Robotic and Process Control Applications). MiRPA’s employment allows the implementation of complex distributed real-time software architectures. It handles publisher/subscriber as well as client/server communication between local and distributed software modules with very small worst-case latencies (≪ 1 ms). Besides introducing basics on inter-module and inter-node communication for these two communication models, deadlock avoiding strategies, and methods of redundancy handling, we finally show results of real-world measurements and applications.