Introducing FINROC: A Convenient Real-time Framework for Robotics based on a Systematic Design Approach

In this paper, we discuss critical aspects in the design of general-purpose software frameworks for the robotics domain, and present FINROC – our attempt to deal with the identified non-functional requirements in the best possible way. Numerous publications on this subject were taken into consideration. Furthermore, we stress the importance of consistently separating framework-independent from framework-dependent code. With maximum (intra-process) communication efficiency in focus, FINROC features a lock-free, zero-copying implementation including support for queues and various communication patterns. Decoupling being a paradigm for the framework internals, it has a minimal core extended via plugins. There is optional graphical tooling that supports to instantiate, connect, and remove components at application runtime. As we plan to continue research on huge behavior networks, FINROC is designed to cope with thousands of components and hundreds of thousands of ports.