A CORBA Wrapper for Applications with Multiple Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a CORBA wrapper which encapsulates a generic anthropomorphic industrial robot. Since this wrapper abstracts the communications, building applications that require remote manipulation or coordination of several devices may be easily achieved by using it. This article describes an implementation of this wrapper over a real-time operating system (RTOS), namely RTAI. This type of OS ensures determinism in the movement operations of the robot. Also, a low resource consuming implementation of the CORBA specification, namely ORBit, has been used to wrap the robot and implement the communications with other devices. Finally, as a matter of example, we present how this wrapper is used to coordinate the operation of several robots in a typical 'pick & place' operation.