Design of an API for Integrating Robotic Software Frameworks

摘要

While there are a number of good software frameworks for robotics applications, these changes over time and it is not so easy to create applications that use multiple frameworks. In this paper, we present the design of an Application Programming Interface (API) for our UoA Robotic Software Framework, a heterogeneous robot development framework that allows interoperation between existing componentbased frameworks such as ROS, ROCOS, and OpenRTM, and also reduces the impact of changing frameworks on development of robotic applications. In the development of this API, four key design concepts are: interoperability, compatibility, support for heterogeneous applications, and dynamic monitoring and control. The API can be used for developing different applications with different frameworks, using the same robot hardware platforms and components, with minimal development of additional procedures. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we developed two case studies, which are both healthcare applications with different programming languages and frameworks, and then applied them to two robot platforms with the same specifications.