Towards Re-orchestration of Real-Time Component Systems in Robotics

Over the last decade, there has been a trend towards component-based systems in robotics software engineering. Although the aspect of real-Time is important to control manipulators with high velocities or forces, it has often been neglected. In this paper, we present a runtime environment for real-Time component systems in robotics. It allows for a generic specification of computation tasks and employs a flexible, rule-based mechanism for composing and coordinating multiple components. Moreover, the runtime environment is capable of seamlessly re-orchestrating the composition of real-Time components at run-Time to adapt to new tasks-even when the robotics system is moving with high speed. For illustration, two examples are given. © 2017 IEEE