Service-Oriented Architecture: On the suitability for mobile robots

Cooperative mobile robots have recently been gaining importance within the field of robotics. It's been proven that collaborative robots can do tasks in a faster and more reliable manner than a single robot can. Additionally, recent advances in distributed coordination algorithms have dramatically improved the feasibility and suitability of cooperative approaches. This has lead researchers to develop Inter-robot communication frameworks. While several frameworks have been introduced, one of the most common is the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, the suitability of SOA for collaborative robotic communication has not been fully evaluated. In this paper we evaluate the SOA from an overhead perspective against non service-based architectures in a wireless environment. Our evaluation is based on performance suitability, which is determined by measuring throughput and delay for different numbers of mobile robots sharing real time data.