Study of service robot architecture based on middleware and abstract environment

More and more robots are integrated in our daily life environment, human-robot interaction is one of the main characteristics of these robots. The service robot must have plenty of sensors to apperceive the environment, understand human's intention. Then the robot's behavior can be conformed with the social rules via pose, expression, voice, multimedia and so on. Uncertain environment and various functions require a flexible architecture to facilitate reuse of software and device. In order to develop low cost service robots to provide various services fast, architecture based on the middleware and abstract environment was proposed. In this architecture, we described the running principle and the members of the architecture, design the abstract environment and environment change event mechanism, and then we extend the event mechanism to be suitable for the different platform via the communication platform. To verify the proposed architecture, we use .NET framework to implement the abstract environment and apply the architecture on the guide service robot and advertisement service robot. The test shows that this architecture is suitable for improving reusability of robot software and reduce develop time.