UPnP Robot Middleware for Ubiquitous Robot Control

摘要

Abstract - The UPnP(Universal Plug and Play) architecture offers pervasive peer-to-peer network connectivity of intelligent appliances in dynamic distributed computing environment. This paper shows that internal software integration of robot and robot service in ubiquitous computing environment are the same thing in nature. This paper also proposes to use the UPnP architecture as a unified framework not only for robot internal software integration, but also for ubiquitous robot control. This paper shows that the UPnP technology could provide a unified framework by describing the usefulness of the UPnP and by showing some experimental result regarding it. Keywords - UPnP, Robot, Middleware, Ubiquitous, Integration. 1. Introduction For a long time, many researchers have been developing robot technologies in various fields: navigation, manipulation, vision, voice recognition, and even robot design. Recently the progress of technology developments has become more rapid than ever. However, it is yet hard to build a complex robot as a combination of those various technologies. Building a complex robot requires a lot of software components that are made by many researchers. It requires some ‘glue’ to connect the software components, too. Middleware can play the role of the ‘glue’ for software component integration. Though middleware is not popular in robot field, the middleware that have been used most is the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture)[1]. The projects that adopted the CORBA include the HRP(Humanoid Robotics Project)[2], the OROCOS(Open Robot Control Systems) project[3], and the Miro(Middleware for mobile robots) project[4]. Currently many robot researchers consid er the CORBA as a possible candidate of their middleware when they try to integrate robot software. In the previous paper[5], we proposed to use the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)[6] as a robot middleware, and examined its possibility. As can be seen in Fig. 1, the UPnP was developed for dynamic distributed environment while the CORBA was developed for distributed environment. Here the dynamic environment means that computing devices can join and leave the network dynamically. As internet was widely spread, the need to accommodate dynamic distributed computing environment was increasing, and new middlewares were devised. The UPnP architecture is one of them. The background idea of our approach is that a robot system itself will or should be dynamic distributed computing environment. Every component of a robot will become modular, and they will be configured dynamically in the future. Another point of view is that robots will be deployed at home or at office like a TV or a refrigerator in the future. And they will have to dynamically join and communicate with home or office networks as home and office are expected to be ubiquitous computing environment in the near future. Therefore, robot will need an appropriate middleware internally and externally for accommodating these dynamic distributed computing environments. The UPnP technology has good features for this environment. It shares the service oriented architecture with emerging We b Service technology[7], so it provides loosely coupled architecture for component connectivity. It also provides late binding and automatic discovery of services, which makes it appropriate for dynamic distributed computing environment as well as ubiquitous computing environment. Fig. 1. Computing problem space of middlewares[8]. Recently there has been released the concept of URC(Ubiquitous Robotic Companion), which is ubiquitous service robots that provide users with the services they need, anytime and anywhere in ubiquitous computing environments[9]. This is the same vision to