Component Composition from Real-time Function Blocks

Today’s Roboticists can choose from a number of different frameworks to build modular component based applications. Yet, the software responsible for hard real-time motion control is still frequently developed as monolithic components.

The idea of COCORF is to overcome this by combining the lightweight microblx function block framework with the RobMoSys meta-modeling approach. In a nutshell, this will allow to replace monolithic components by compositions of and self-describing function blocks, thereby fostering reuse while simplifying testing and maintenance.

Additionally, connector blocks to general purpose robotics frameworks like ROS will be developed to allow straightforward integration with existing non-real-time components. To illustrate approach and technology, a reference architecture for the example of a mobile manipulation system will be developed and made available to the community.

 

“I am excited to contribute to RobMoSys because I am convinced that the RobMoSys approach of driving development by means of composable, domain specific models has the potential to overcome many of the problems faced in the development of complex systems today. In particular I believe this approach will benefit the often overlooked field of software engineering for real-time motion control systems in terms of reducing development time while improving overall quality!”  Markus Klotzbücher, MKIO

 

 

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