Towards Re-orchestration of Real-Time Component Systems in Robotics

Over the last decade, there has been a trend towards component-based systems in robotics software engineering. Although the aspect of real-time is important to control manipulators with high velocities or forces, it has often been neglected. In this paper, we present a runtime environment for real-time component systems in robotics. It allows for a generic specification of computation tasks and employs a flexible, rule-based mechanism for composing and coordinating multiple components. Moreover, the runtime environment is capable of seamlessly re-orchestrating the composition of real-time components at run-time to adapt to new tasks - even when the robotics system is moving with high speed. For illustration, two examples are given.