An industrial standard based control architecture for multi-robot real time coordination

This paper presents the challenges in the development of a new middleware for collaborative robotics and also for the new needs of interaction between robots and humans. The authors introduce first the main characteristics of a middleware; three types of middleware are proposed in the literature: Message Oriented Middleware, Middleware based on Remote Procedure Calls and also middleware based on the Object Request Broker. Thus a state of art of the most common middleware is given; ROS, RT-middleware and Orocos are detailed. Strong points and weak points are highlighted to justify the need to develop a new middleware. Based on this statement, the specifications of a new middleware are given with an important issue: develop a middleware that will meet complex research issues and also industrial issues for the future of robotics. In order to meet these issues, we propose the foundations of our approach. The middleware will be realtime, transferable, maintainable and multi-manufacturers. These requirements will also be able to guaranty the safety interaction of humans and machines in a dynamic and collaborative environment. Finally the efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated by using two different robots: a 6 dof industrial robot and a new 16 dof dextrous robot hand.