The shift in the robotics paradigm — The Hardware Robot Operating System (H-ROS); an infrastructure to create interoperable robot components

Abstract

This article introduces the Hardware Robot Operating System (H-ROS), a joint hardware and software infrastructure to create vendor-agnostic reusable and reconfigurable robot hardware components. These robot components dynamically modify and extend the internal representation model of the robot enabling robots to switch on or off components selectively and literally exchange hardware components between them reducing the integration effort of building robots. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of the hypotheses presented, discuss future work and improvements on top of the proposed H-ROS infrastructure.