Native Robot Software Framework Inter-operation

Component-based software is a major recent design trend in robotics. It brings many benefits to system design, implementation, maintenance and architectural flexibility. While previous methods of structuring software led to monolithic robot software incapable of easily using multiple architectures, the component-based approach, combined with some suitable software engineering decisions, opens new possibilities for interaction amongst architectures. Rather than using a single architecture for an entire robot system, we now have the opportunity to use the best architecture for the job in each part of the robot without inefficient wrapping or translation. For example, a real-time architecture for actuator control and a planning-based architecture for intelligence. In this paper, we use the example of a native ROS transport for the OpenRTM-aist architecture to illustrate the benefits of allowing architectures to interact in this way.