Designing Distributed, Component-Based Systems for Industrial Robotic Applications

Abstract

The viability and cost effectiveness of new distributed industrial robotic applications can be widely enhanced exploiting COTS-based software components. However, systems implementing those applications must face demanding challenges: they should be dynamically reconfigurable and highly scalable to deal with a potentially large number of peers, they should provide real-time features, guaranteed performance and efficient concurrency mechanisms, both locally and in a distributed environment. The CORBA middleware, especially with its recent extensions, has proven well suited for the needs of many distributed robotic systems. In this paper, we have summarized our experience resulting from the development of distributed robotic applications based on Real-Time CORBA. Results show that exploitation of CORBA brings a number of remarkable advantages in the distributed robotic domain, enabling portable, highly reconfigurable applications with support for concurrency and real-time features. Furthermore, CORBA standard services for naming resolution, data distribution and concurrency control avoid the need for ad hoc solutions, which are often error prone, require significant development effort, and prevent portability. Of course, providing transparency and high level services in CORBA is not without cost. Nevertheless, the recent scaling of network and Internet infrastructures to higher levels of performance and QoS guarantees has made less relevant the overhead introduced by CORBA. Drawbacks encountered in our experience stem from the incompleteness in the implementation of the CORBA standard suite. None of the available CORBA ORBs offers a