GenoM3: Building middleware-independent robotic components

Abstract

The topic of reusable software in robotics is now largely addressed. Components based architectures, where components are independent units that can be reused accross applications, have become more popular. As a consequence, a long list of middlewares and integration tools is available in the community, often in the form of open-source projects. However, these projects are generally self contained with little reuse between them. This paper presents a software engineering approach that intends to grant middleware independance to robotic software components so that a clear separation of concerns is achieved between highly reusable algorithmic parts and integration frameworks. Such a decoupling let middlewares be used interchangeably, while fully benefitting from their specific, individual features. This work has been integrated into a new version of the open-source G en oM component generator tool: G en oM3.

An information based feedback control for audio-motor binaural localization

“…Its software architecture is based on the ROS middleware. Real time components such as binaural audio stream server or three-stage active localization have been synthesized by means of the GenoM3 module generator (Mallet et al 2010). The supervision task which manages the program, plots and saves the results, is performed by a MATLAB client.…”

An Approach to Distributed Component-Based Software for Robotics

“…The user can associate C++ callbacks to transitions, much like the codels for G en oM [Mallet et al (2010) A key design principle for CoolBOT components is to take advantage of multithreaded and multicore capacities of mainstream operating systems, and the infrastructure they provide for multithreaded programming. Another key principle of design for components was to separate functional logic from thread synchronization logic.…”

“…Many of the approaches that have come up in these last years, albeit different, are either based completely, or follow or share to a certain extend some of the fundamentals ideas of the CBSE (Component Based Software Engineering) [George T. Heineman & William T. Councill (2001)] paradigm as a principle of design for robotic software. Some of the significant approaches freely available within the robotics community based on the CBSE paradigm are G en oM/BIP [Mallet et al (2010) [Schlegel et al (2009)], OROCOS [The Orocos Project (2011)], project ORCA [Brooks et al (2005)], OpenRTM-aist [Ando et al (2008)] and Willow Garage's ROS project [ROS: Robot Operating System (2011)]. All these approaches, in general incompatible among them, use many similar abstractions in order to build robotic software out of a set of software components.…”

Design Abstraction and Processes in Robotics: From Code-Driven to Model-Driven Engineering

“…The BRICS project [39] specifically aims at exploiting MDE as enabling approach to reducing the development effort of engineering robotic systems by making best practice robotic solutions more easily reusable. [42] proposes scripting mechanisms to bind component skeleton templates. These ongoing activities are covering first steps towards MDE in robotics.…”