Robot Raconteur: A communication architecture and library for robotic and automation systems

Robot Raconteur is a new distributed communication architecture and library designed for robotic and automation systems with distributed resources, including data and program modules. The motivation for this architecture is based on the need to rapidly connect sensors and actuators distributed across a network together in a development environment, such as MATLAB, without time consuming development of data communication infrastructure. The architecture consists of interconnected nodes, communicating through message passing. Each node is typically a process running on a computer or embedded device, which may be a critical real-time, non-critical real-time, or event driven process. Robot Raconteur is organized as three hierarchical levels: channels that provide communication between nodes, message passing which routes messages between endpoints within the nodes, and an object-based client-service model that is built on top of message passing. The implementation of Robot Raconteur nodes so far consists of Microsoft C#, Microsoft C++, MATLAB, MATLAB/Simulink xPC Target, and the Arduino embedded processor. Implementation on four distributed control systems consisted of multiple sensors, actuators, and computation nodes are presented, including smart room (an instrumented room with distributed lighting control and sensor feedback), dual-arm robotic system, multi-probe microassembly station, and adaptive optical scanning microscope.