Project
This project will bridge a major gap in the current state of industrial robots by allowing for easy, rapid, and secure integration of robots, sensors, peripherals, and simulation software from multiple vendors and platforms. Funding this project will elevate the current state from research laboratory use to industrial deployment, simplifying the integration of software and hardware components.
Objective
Advance an existing plug-and-play solution to robotics and automation integration tasks.
Technical Approach
Robot Raconteur (RR) is an advanced augmented object-oriented middleware technology. RR uses the following capabilities that make it a valuable tool for interoperability:
- Augmented Object-Oriented architecture with expanded functionality designed for robotics and automation systems. RR features eight member types, including Property, Function, Event, ObjRef, Pipe, Callback, Wire, Memory.
- Plug-and-play capability from the ground-up
- Authentication and exclusive access control, allowing users with sufficient privileges to request exclusive access to objects in a service to prevent crosstalk
- Flexible transports. RR is transport agnostic; any transport capable of moving messages between nodes is acceptable
- Compatible with Linux, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, OpenBSD, QNX, Arduino, and xPC Target. Libraries for C++, Python, C#, Java, MATLAB, LabView, browser JavaScript, and xPC Target
Participants
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Principal Investigator), Southwest Research Institute, Wason Technology, United Technology Corporation