The 8th International Symposium on Intelligent Systems Techniques for Ad hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks (IST-AWSN) Connecting Wireless Sensor Networks to the Robot Operating System

Robot systems largely depend on embedded systems to operate. The interfaces of those embedded systems, e.g. motor controllers or laser scanners, are often vendor-specific and therefore require a component that translates from/to the Robot Operating System (ROS) Middleware interface. In this work we present an implementation and evaluation of a ROS Middleware client based on the Contiki operating systems, which is suitable for constrained embedded devices, like wireless sensor nodes. We show that in-buffer processing of ROS messages without relying on dynamic memory allocation is possible. That message contents can be accessed conveniently via well-known concepts of the C language (structs) with negligible processing overhead compared to a C++-based client. And that the message-passing middleware concept of ROS fits nicely in Contiki’s event-based nature. Furthermore, in order for an environment enriched with wireless sensor network to help robots in navigating, understanding and manipulating environments a direct integration is mandatory. c � 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. and/or peer reviewed under the responsibility of [name organizer]