EVALUATING AND OPTIMIZING COMPONENT-BASED ROBOT ARCHITECTURES USING NETWORK SIMULATION

Modern service and humanoid robots are comprised of multiple computers distributed among the robots’ hardware. During task execution, several software components are executed in parallel on the connected machines. Due to the complex control loops and communication requirements of robot tasks, a suitable assignment of software components to the available hardware units is necessary to achieve low reaction times. Currently, there is a lack of works on approaches to evaluate intra-robot communication. We propose a coupling between the robotics framework ArmarX and the network simulator OMNeT++ to support the evaluation and optimization of robot architectures. Our approach allows unmodified robot components to communicate across simulated network interconnects. In a case study, we examine the influence of different hardware assignments of software components on task execution times. We show that the timing information present in the simulation-based evaluations enables more efficient hardware assignments when compared to static graph partitioning.