A Survey on Intermediation Architectures for Underwater Robotics

Xin Li, José-Fernán Martínez, Jesús Rodríguez-Molina, Néstor Martínez
2016 Sensors  
Currently, there is a plethora of solutions regarding interconnectivity and interoperability for networked robots so that they will fulfill their purposes in a coordinated manner. In addition to that, middleware architectures are becoming increasingly popular due to the advantages that they are capable of guaranteeing (hardware abstraction, information homogenization, easy access for the applications above, etc.). However, there are still scarce contributions regarding the global state of the
more » ... t in intermediation architectures for underwater robotics. As far as the area of robotics is concerned, this is a major issue that must be tackled in order to get a holistic view of the existing proposals. This challenge is addressed in this paper by studying the most compelling pieces of work for this kind of software development in the current literature. The studied works have been assessed according to their most prominent features and capabilities. Furthermore, by studying the individual pieces of work and classifying them several common weaknesses have been revealed and are highlighted. This provides a starting ground for the development of a middleware architecture for underwater robotics capable of dealing with these issues. ' CLARAty [11] is defined as a framework both generic and object-oriented used for new algorithms integration in a variety of fields, such as vision, control, locomotion, navigation, localization, manipulation, planning and execution. It is mentioned to have been adapted to heterogeneous robots with different hardware control architectures and mechanisms. ' Player 2.0 [12], based on a previous work named Player/Stage that uses robotics under a client-server paradigm, is claimed to improve the latter in two aspects: simplicity (withholding some of the features of the driver API from the user) and flexibility (library division to allow its usage with different transport layers). Sensors 2016, 16, 190 4 of 42 ' ORCA [13] is an open-source software project making use of component-based software engineering to robotics. The framework is described to be the most prominent feature of the proposal, as it is able to adopt a commercial middleware package, an approach towards framework design that intends to be as minimalist as possible, and a stress on multi-language and multi-platform support. ' MIRO [14] is another object-oriented robot middleware focused on obtaining portability and maintainability for the developed robot software. It provides generic abstract services like localization or behavior engines. ' OpenRTM-aist [15] implements some of the extended features that are used according to the Robotics Technology (RT) middleware standard. It has actually been developed by the same institution that created the RT standard (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tokyo, Japan). It includes a manager component to aid the manipulation of other RT Components, too.
doi:10.3390/s16020190 pmid:26861321 pmcid:PMC4801567 fatcat:lgp5hco4nzfgpfzkhpiyctrmeq