Reliable Communication Mechanism Design for Interaction Between Android and ROS

There exists a wide application prospect in the interaction between the android system and ROS (Robot Operating System). Google and Willow Garage have developed the android_core package based on rosjava to build a ROS environment in the android system. However, the current mechanism cannot guarantee the reliable communication. This paper proposes two fundamental approaches to solve above problem. On the one hand, a communication anomaly detection module CheckNodeConnection in the application layer of the TCP/IP protocol is designed to detect the connection anomaly of network. On the other hand, we develop a communication mechanism called RosActionOnAndroid on the android system inspired by the “ROS Action Protocol” in ROS. The experimental results show that CheckNodeConnection can effectively detect the connection state between android and ROS, and RosActionOnAndroid communication mechanism can obtain the task execution status feedback of the ROS robot and support the preemptable task, which make the interactive control more accurate and reliable.