MicROS-drt: supporting real-time and scalable data distribution in distributed robotic systems

• Published in: Robotics and biomimetics Vol. 3; no. 1; p. 6
• Main Authors: Ding, Bo, Wang, Huaimin, Fan, Zedong, Zhang, Pengfei, Liu, Hui
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01-01-2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Engineering; Real-time Computing and Robotics; Robotics and Automation; Systems Biology; Robot software infrastructure; Real-time data distribution; Distributed computing
• ISSN: 2197-3768; 2197-3768
• DOI: 10.1186/s40638-016-0038-y

A primary requirement in distributed robotic software systems is the dissemination of data to all interested collaborative entities in a timely and scalable manner. However, providing such a service in a highly dynamic and resource-limited robotic environment is a challenging task, and existing robot software infrastructure has limitations in this aspect. This paper presents a novel robot software infrastructure, micROS-drt, which supports real-time and scalable data distribution. The solution is based on a loosely coupled data publish-subscribe model with the ability to support various time-related constraints. And to realize this model, a mature data distribution standard, the data distribution service for real-time systems (DDS), is adopted as the foundation of the transport layer of this software infrastructure. By elaborately adapting and encapsulating the capability of the underlying DDS middleware, micROS-drt can meet the requirement of real-time and scalable data distribution in distributed robotic systems. Evaluation results in terms of scalability, latency jitter and transport priority as well as the experiment on real robots validate the effectiveness of this work.