A Case Study: Robot Manager for Multi-Robot Systems with Heterogeneous Component-based Frameworks

Robotic software developers may need to use different component-based software frameworks, such as ROS, OPROS and OpenRTM, for developing intelligent robots, but then face challenges with interoperability, code maintainability and reusability over multiple frameworks. In this paper, we present a design and implementation of the robot manager software for our robotic software framework, which helps to integrate different programming frameworks easily, and to minimize the impact of different frameworks and new versions. We have designed the robot manager to fulfil the following four specifications: interoperability, compatibility, heterogeneous systems, and Application Program Interface (API) abstraction. The proposed framework allows us to use different applications with various components from different frameworks. It also supports communication between heterogeneous robot systems. For an evaluation case study, we have developed two different robot systems, which cooperate with each other using our robotic software framework, which in turn integrates components from different frameworks. We report on our evaluation of the effectiveness of the four design specifications of the robot manager.