CoHoN: A Fault-Tolerant Publish/Subscribe Tree-Based Middleware for Robots with Heterogeneous Communication Hardware

摘要

The increasing functionality and capability of current mobile robots is partially a result of an increased number of sensors and actors. But this larger amount of sensors and actors results in more communication between the robot's components. Nevertheless, mobile robots also have to be lightweight, they have limited size and benefit from long operation times. These constraints are limiting the choice of components, which again can result in a situation where different communication hardware has to be integrated. In general, communication in robotic systems incorporates a lot of small-sized messages of some bytes and messages of several kilobytes but very few in between. Reconfigurable robots and multi-robot systems also have some similarities to mobile ad-hoc networks as their connectivity may change during operations. CoHoN is a transparent, connection-based, publish/subscribe communication middleware for networks with heterogeneous hardware which addresses the needs of communication in robotics. It provides failure resiliance, multipath routing, quality-of-service capabilities, and very low message overhead.