Broker: an interprocess communication solution for multi-robot systems

Abstract

We describe in this paper a novel implementation of the interprocess communication (IPC) technology, called Broker, in support of the development and the operation of a complex robot system. We view each robot system as a collection of processes that need to exchange information, e.g. motion commands and sensory data, in a flexible and convenient fashion, without affecting each other's operations in case of a process's scheduled termination or unexpected failure. We argue that the IPC technology provides an ideal framework for this purpose, and we carefully make our design decisions about its implementation based on the needs of robotics applications. Broker is programming language, operating system, and hardware platform independent and has served us well in a RoboCup project and collective robotics experiments, in both simulation and real-world environments.