Design and Performance Evaluation of a Service-Oriented Robotics Application

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is becoming increasingly important and is being adopted by more and more organizations. However, the applications and research of SOC have been limited to Web services and enterprise systems. Embedded systems and robotics applications are recent domains that SOC has been applied to. This paper provides an insight about the application of SOC for robotics, event-driven paradigm of designing robotics system, and a model for publishing and utilizing the artifacts that are required for building SOC-based robotics applications. The main benefit of SOC robotics application is to have a layer of common services with standard interfaces. The invocations of the services are device-independent. In this way, we can deploy the same application to different robotics platforms, as long as we rebind the service invocation to the services that are built for the robotics platform. Sponsored by Intel, we have developed a number of prototypes using different boards, processors, and drive systems. We have measured the performance and power consumption of these prototypes.