Robotics

The next generation of robots will for the first time bring science fiction to the real world. Rather than fixed, stationary machines anchored to an assembly line, they will interact fully with their environment. More importantly, they will respond and modify their behavior solely based on that interaction with their environment, as well as interaction with other robots.

Autonomous vehicles and robots will roam battlefields and take military action. Security robots will roam the corridors and offices of office buildings, alerting authorities to possible breaches as well as actively closing off systems to protect them from further attack.

Home robots will assist the elderly and the physically challenged, communicating outside of the home when a need arises. You may have already seen some of the demonstrations of walking robots from a variety of Japanese manufacturers. These are merely proof-of-concept prototypes of much more advanced robots to come in the future.

For this daunting engineering task, software architects need a high-performance distributed communications architecture. Power constraints placed upon these robots mean that the architecture must have an extremely small footprint, yet the sophistication of the software modules requires that the architecture be extremely reliable and high-performance.

These robots share one thing in common: CORBA.

Robots are complex distributed systems. CORBA enables the behavior of a control object, with a robot controlled server, to be designed completely independent of the clients operating system. Allowing applications and their objects, which have been written in different programming languages, to interoperate across heterogeneous operating systems.

CORBA presents a clean, easily specifiable way for composable pieces to assemble the system. ORBexpress® provides the robotics developer with a small footprint, high-performance CORBA implementation that further provides a high level of safety and security for the robotics application.

Robotics applications include:

• • Service Robots
  • Surgical Robot Systems
  • Mobile Robot Servers
  • Distributed Virtual Applications
  • Unmanned Aerial Vechicles
  • Battlefield Robots
  • Home Robots