A Mobile Robot Middleware Supporting Self-adaptive Programming

Middleware technology has been proven to be effective towards high software productivity and quality. With the rapid technology advancement in the fields such as computing, wireless communication, mechatronics, and sensor technologies, robotic systems has made great development, and been widely applied in different application domains. The diversity of robot hardware and software platforms as well as the changing working environment, has increased the cost of software development, reduced the development efficiency, and made software development process and system performance unpredictable. Hence, the research about platform-independent programming methodology and frameworks for robot is in great need. In this paper, we aim to develop a unified mobile robot middleware system that supporting self-adaptive applications, with three different robot cars as the target hardware platforms.A mobile robot middleware proposed in this paper that supports self-adaptive programming should consist of the following four requirements:●Cross-platform capability. The middleware should be implemented on multiple robotsystems. The diversity of hardware and software developing environment on mobile robotsmakes the software part of robot system not reusable without cross-platform middlewaresupport.●Self-adaptive capability. The introduction of the software self-adaptive capability is toreduce the cost of handling the complexity of software systems that interacting with externalenvironment. The differences of robot hardware increase the complexity of controllingmobile robot for the middleware, and reduce the robustness of the middleware.●QoS guarantees. We propose the concept of "elementary action" from "action sequence",and then discuss the decomposition of potential errors of "elementary action". Theexperimental reults of "elementary action" show that the robot middleware must provide QoSguarantee to facilitate the implementation of user programs.●High-level abstract programming framework. A complete self-adaptive middlewareshould provide a high-level abstract programming framework for the self-adaptive logic ofthe upper layer applications.We then introduce the implementation of our prototype middleware in detail, which is summarized as follows:●First, we introduce the architecture and the workflow of the LeJOS platform, and how to portthe JVM is described.●Second, a unified abstraction level navigation control is constructed for the robot platforms toimprove the reusability of actuator-controlling code and reduce the heterogeneity of thecontrol logic.●Third, the self-adaptive tuning mechanism and its implementation are introduced. In this part,the tuning mechanism of "basic action" is firstly introduced. Then, the sensors’andexperimental constraints of the mechanism are explored. Lastly, the mechanism is layered and decomposed of several components to more easily implement the mechanism.●Fourth, the user interface of the middleware is introduced.●Lastly, the workflow of the middleware is introduced in detail by means of sequentialdiagrams of three use cases.We then analyze the experimental results of "elementary action" and evaluate the performance of the prototype middleware. The experimental result shows that the middleware can effectively ensure the effects of "elementary action", and its QoS has been significantly improved. Finally, an application example based on the prototype middleware is given.