Service component architecture in robotics: the SCA-Orocos integration

Recent robotics studies are investigating how robots can ex- ploit the World Wide Web in order to offer their functionality and re- trieve information that is useful for completing their tasks. This new trend requires the ability of integrating robotics and information sys- tems technology. On the first side a set of robotics component based frameworks, which are typically data flow oriented, have been developed throughout the last years and Orocos is one of the most mature. On the other side the state of the art is represented by the Service Ori- ented Architecture, where the Service Component Architecture defines a component-based implementation of this approach.
The paper reports the progress of our work, which aims to promote in the robotics field a cooperation between Service Oriented Architecture and Data Flow Oriented Architecture. To achieve this we propose an integra- tion between SCA and Orocos. We first highlight a set of architectural mismatches that have to be faced for allowing this integration and then we introduce a java-based library, called JOrocos, that represents our solution to these mismatches. Finally we describe a case study in which SCA and Orocos components cooperate for monitoring the status of a robot.