Service Object Request Management Architecture: SORMA Concepts and Examples

We report on SORMA, the Service Object Request Management Architecture, its concept, developement, and implementation examples. SORMA provides an intelligent “object-bus” for distributed computing and inter-operation of robotics hardware. It is a software framework for rapid development of object-oriented software modules and their integration into stand-alone and distributed applications. SORMA was designed to meet the requirements arising from a large set of spcialized robotics components in a university research institution (see also SFB360-TR-96-4). Our experiences show,(i) that many robotics experiments and applications typically have been a “one-of-a-kind” process, where often the software was developed from scratch, even though much of the code is similar to code written for other applications; (ii) due to the short life-time of single-usage code, extensive, robust, and verbose exception handling is often sacrificed; (iii) early sharing and integration of several complex application components, concurently developed by a team of programmers, needs strong tool support. SORMA encourages the re-use of components by interactive test, exploration,and usage throughout the life span of a software component. At the same time this user-friendlyness does not impair its real-time capabilities. After describing the SORMA concept, we report on two hybrid integration examples: The “Bielefeld Robot Checkers Player” and a realtime 3 D tracking application combining vision and force commands.