Robotics library: An object-oriented approach to robot applications

We discuss the architecture and software engineering principles of the Robotics Library (RL). Driven by requirements of robot systems, research projects, industrial applications, and education, we identify relevant design requirements and present an approach to manage hardware and real-time, provide a user-friendly, object-oriented interface to powerful kinematics and dynamics calculations, and support various platforms. After over ten years of development that started in 2004 and evaluating many variants of the architecture, we discuss the design choices for the components of the library in its current version.

[1]  Erik B. Dam,et al.  Quaternions, Interpolation and Animation , 2000 .

[2]  Manfred Hiller,et al.  An object-oriented approach for an effective formulation of multibody dynamics , 1994 .

[3]  Patrizia Scandurra,et al.  Component-based robotic engineering (Part I) [Tutorial] , 2009, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[4]  Alois Knoll,et al.  Constraint task-based control in industrial settings , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[5]  Alois Knoll,et al.  CALIPER: A universal robot simulation framework for tendon-driven robots , 2011, 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[6]  Oliver Brock,et al.  Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in Sampling-Based Motion Planning , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[7]  Olivier Michel,et al.  Cyberbotics Ltd. Webots™: Professional Mobile Robot Simulation , 2004 .

[8]  Erwin Prassler,et al.  Component-based refactoring of motion planning libraries , 2010, 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[9]  C. Taliercio,et al.  Performance Comparison of VxWorks, Linux, RTAI, and Xenomai in a Hard Real-Time Application , 2008 .

[10]  Takuji Nishimura,et al.  Mersenne twister: a 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform pseudo-random number generator , 1998, TOMC.

[11]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[12]  Surya P. N. Singh,et al.  V-REP: A versatile and scalable robot simulation framework , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[13]  Sergey Brin,et al.  Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces , 1995, VLDB.

[14]  Olivier Michel,et al.  Cyberbotics Ltd. Webots™: Professional Mobile Robot Simulation , 2004, ArXiv.

[15]  Alois Knoll,et al.  Computed muscle control for an anthropomimetic elbow joint , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[16]  Alois Knoll,et al.  The Bounding Mesh Algorithm , 2015 .

[17]  Roy Featherstone,et al.  Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms , 2007 .

[18]  Markus Rickert,et al.  Efficient Motion Planning for Intuitive Task Execution in Modular Manipulation Systems , 2011 .

[19]  Jimmy A. Jørgensen,et al.  RobWork: A Flexible Toolbox for Robotics Research and Education , 2010, ISR/ROBOTIK.

[20]  Roy Featherstone,et al.  A Beginner's Guide to 6-D Vectors (Part 2) [Tutorial] , 2010, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[21]  Andrew Howard,et al.  Design and use paradigms for Gazebo, an open-source multi-robot simulator , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[22]  Lydia E. Kavraki,et al.  The Open Motion Planning Library , 2012, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[23]  Herman Bruyninckx,et al.  The real-time motion control core of the Orocos project , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[24]  Martin Otter,et al.  A versatile C++ toolbox for model based, real time control systems of robotic manipulators , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[25]  James J. Kuffner,et al.  OpenRAVE: A Planning Architecture for Autonomous Robotics , 2008 .

[26]  Alois Knoll,et al.  Task level robot programming using prioritized non-linear inequality constraints , 2016, 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[27]  Morten Strandberg,et al.  Robot path planning : an object-oriented approach , 2004 .

[28]  Ron Alterovitz,et al.  Fast Nearest Neighbor Search in SE(3) for Sampling-Based Motion Planning , 2014, WAFR.

[29]  David Eberly,et al.  Quaternion Algebra and Calculus , 2002 .