Coordinating Software Components in a Component-Based Architecture for Robotics

Component-based software is a major design trend in robot software. It brings many benefits to system design, implementation and maintenance. One step in using component-based methods in designing the structure of a robot program is managing the components and the connections between them over time, known as coordination. In this paper we present a framework for coordinating component networks using the OpenRTM-aist software architecture, implemented using the concurrent Erlang language. The framework provides a coordination system that mimics the internal state-change notification system of OpenRTMaist. Rather than being a fixed- structure coordinator, it allows robot developers to implement a coordinator matching the style of coordination they need. This paper shows that Erlang has potential in robotics.