A distributed real-time system framework design for multi-robot cooperative systems using real-time CORBA

Distributed system frameworks (also known as middlewares) are developed to wrap distributed components regardless of their program languages, operating systems, and hardware platforms. Middleware hides networking details from application developers, and it increases reusability and reconfigurability of developed systems. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a standard middleware. We adapt CORBA for our multi-robot research since it hides all network program details from programmers. Thus, CORBA increases development efficiency and component reusability. Recently Real-time CORBA (RT-CORBA) has been defined by Object Management Group (OMG), and it supports many real-time properties. Using RT-CORBA, we can define and implement real-time applications with stringent end-to-end quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this research, we tested one of the RT-CORBA properties. We show our testing result of a propagated priority model to guarantee that a high priority client invocation can be processed before that of a low priority client.