Performance Evaluation of a Distributed Integrative Architecture for Robotics

The field of robotics employs a vast amount of coupled sub-systems. These need to interact cooperatively and concurrently in order to yield the desired results. Some hybrid algorithms also require intensive cooperative interactions internally. The architecture proposed lends itself amenable to problem domains that require rigorous calculations that are usually impeded by the capacity of a single machine, and incompatibility issues between software computing elements. Implementations are abstracted away from the physical hardware for ease of development and competition in simulation leagues. Monolithic developments are complex, and the desire for decoupled architectures arises. Decoupling also lowers the threshold for using distributed and parallel resources. The ability to re-use and re-combine components on demand, therefore is essential, while maintaining the necessary degree of interaction. For this reason we propose to build software components on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web Services. An additional benefit is platform independence regarding both the operating system and the implementation language. The robot soccer platform as well as the associated simulation leagues are the target domain for the development. Furthermore are machine vision and remote process control related portions of the architecture currently in development and testing for industrial environments. We provide numerical data based on the Python frameworks ZSI and SOAPpy undermining the suitability of this approach for the field of robotics. Response times of significantly less than 50 ms even for fully interpreted, dynamic languages provides hard information showing the feasibility of Web Services based SOAs even in time critical robotic applications.