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Simple Concurrency for Robotics with the Roboscoop Framework

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Simple Concurrency for Robotics with the Roboscoop Framework Simple Concurrency for Robotics with the Roboscoop Framework Andrey Rusakov Jiwon Shin Bertrand Meyer Chair of Software Engineering Department of Computer Science ETH Zurich,¨ Switzerland fandrey.rusakov, jiwon.shin, [email protected] Abstract— Concurrency is inherent to robots, and using enables even novice programmers to program concurrent concurrency in robotics can greatly enhance performance of the robotic software. Current Roboscoop contains behaviors and robotics applications. So far, however, the use of concurrency in tools necessary for the operation of differential drive robots robotics has been limited and cumbersome. This paper presents Roboscoop, a new robotics framework based on Simple Concur- and has been tested on two different robots. rent Object Oriented Programming (SCOOP). SCOOP excludes This paper is organized as follows: After presenting related data races by construction, thereby eliminating a major class of work in Section II, the paper presents the core of Roboscoop concurrent programming errors. Roboscoop utilizes SCOOP’s framework in Section III. Section IV presents an example of concurrency and synchronization mechanisms for coordination using Roboscoop for the task of exploring an unknown area. in robotics applications. We demonstrate Roboscoop’s simplicity by comparing Roboscoop to existing middlewares and evaluate Section V compares Roboscoop against other middlewares Roboscoop’s usability by employing it in education. and also presents an evaluation of Roboscoop in education. The paper concludes with final remarks in Section VI. I. INTRODUCTION Advanced robotic systems are composed of many com- II. RELATED WORK ponents that can operate concurrently. Running these com- In the last decade, many middlewares have been pro- ponents concurrently would enable robots to meet their full posed to ease the development of robotic coordination and potential. Researchers have noticed the value of concurrency control. Some of the more popular middlewares include in robotics three decades ago. Kanayama [1] proposed a Urbi [3], MOOS [4], Microsoft Robotics Developer Stu- simple message passing mechanism to synchronize a robot’s dio [5], ROS [6], and LCM [7]. Two recent surveys [8], [9] multiprocessing units, and Ingemar and Gehani [2] showed provide a comprehensive overview and comparison of mid- how Concurrent C, a general purposed language, can be dlewares. In addition, the related work section of MIRA [10] applied in robotics. Despite the early effort, little progress provides a compact survey of middlewares with the largest has been made in using concurrency in robotics. impact. Here, we highlight how they compare to Roboscoop. Introducing concurrency to robotics poses a great chal- Section V-A presents a more-detailed comparison. lenge. Enabling concurrency in a robotic system requires its Mission Orientated Operating Suite (MOOS) uses software to support concurrent execution. Traditional concur- store/fetch mechanism for message-passing. Robot Operat- rent programming techniques such as standard ”threading li- ing System (ROS) uses a combination of publish/subscribe braries” do not, however, offer any safety guarantees. Hence, and service-based message-passing models. The Lightweight the programmer must write concurrent programs carefully to Communications and Marshalling (LCM) utilizes only a pub- avoid common pitfalls of concurrency such as data races and lish/subscribe message-passing model and additional mar- deadlocks. Consequently, most robotic software make only shalling tools to support low-latency applications. MIRA, elementary use of concurrency or avoid it all together. a recently introduced robotics middleware with a focus on This paper introduces Roboscoop, a new robotics frame- performance, also uses publish/subscribe message-passing work based on Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Program- model and supports multi-threaded accesses through slots. ming (SCOOP). Unlike standard approaches that are complex While all these middlewares concentrate on the inter-process and error-prone and require additional qualifications, SCOOP communication, Roboscoop does coordination and concur- makes concurrency simple and safe. SCOOP is free of data rency on the level of a single application. MOOS, ROS, races by construction. Built on top of SCOOP, Roboscoop en- and LCM applications can be written in general-purpose ables programmers to express robot’s behaviors in a natural languages such as C++ and Java, and their application way without worrying about the program’s safety. In addition support for concurrency is limited to the standard ”threading to SCOOP’s concurrency and synchronization mechanisms, library” approach. On the contrary, Roboscoop provides the Roboscoop provides a library support for robotics, Behavior- language support for concurrency. Signaler-Controller design for coordination of tasks, and ROS SMACH [11] is a ROS-independent Python library infrastructure for integration with external frameworks. We for building hierarchical state machines for specifying mod- demonstrate Roboscoop’s simplicity by comparing it to ex- els of complex robotic behavior. SMACH supports parallel isting middlewares and present Roboscoop in education that execution of state behaviors, but its applicability is limited to scenarios where all possible states and state transitions can • Library (set of primitives and tools be described explicitly. Concurrency in SMACH is bound Roboscoop for their coordination) to the language support, more precisely, to Python threads. • Integration with other robotics frameworks Roboscoop’s concurrency is based on SCOOP that offers • Object-Oriented Structure simpler and safer concurrency than Python threads. SCOOP • Synchronization • Concurrency Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) is a .NET- C/C++ • Calls to external libraries providing based robotics programming environment that uses the Con- communication, navigation, image processing, currency and Coordination Runtime library for parallelism. Externals coordinate transforms, visualization, … Based on .NET, the library manages asynchronous parallel tasks through message-passing. Unlike MRDS that intro- Fig. 1: The Roboscoop framework structure duces work items, Roboscoop does not have to introduce any additional intermediate abstractions for concurrency. In A. SCOOP – Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Program- Roboscoop, concurrency can be reached on the object level. ming Urbi is a software platform for robotics, which along with SCOOP model [15], [16] is an extension of a standard the C++ support brings urbiscript [12] - a parallel event- sequential object-oriented model, Eiffel, and the Design based object-oriented script language. Urbiscript and SCOOP by Contract paradigm [17] to support concurrency. The go in the same direction by providing tools for coordination model provides a higher level of abstraction through object- and concurrency on the language level. Their difference lies orientation and minimizes common concurrency-specific in their complexity. For concurrency, urbiscript introduces mistakes. Programmers using SCOOP can represent, for a set of unmatched additional mechanisms and syntactic instance, various parts of a robot as objects and manipulate extensions to the language while SCOOP introduces only them concurrently without the burden of threads. SCOOP one additional keyword. eliminates data races by construction. In addition to middlewares, some languages have also been Every object in SCOOP is associated with a certain proposed for robotics. Concurrent C [2] provides concur- processor called its handler, for the object’s entire lifetime. rency on top of a general-purpose language and has been Contrary to CPU, SCOOP processor is just an abstract proposed for usage in robotics. SCOOP’s advantage over independent unit of control and is typically implemented as non-object-oriented concurrency languages such as Con- a thread. Only the object’s handler is allowed to execute current C is its ability of reasoning about different robot features, i.e, a set of possible actions, on the object. Each components as programming objects. This results in more object has exactly one handler, but a single processor can modular design and reusable applications. As a general- handle multiple objects. When two objects are handled by purpose language, SCOOP provides more flexibility than different processors, they are called separate to each other. domain-specific languages. For instance, Task Description separate objects can operate concurrently. Language [13], based on the task tree data structure, has nodes that can contain only commands, goals, monitors, Because features of a separate object can only be executed handler or exceptions. SCOOP used in Roboscoop retains its full by its own handler, it may seem that the is not flexibility of a general-purpose language. allowed to execute features on other separate objects. But if client The Roboscoop framework builds on top of the work by in the scope of the current object ( ), there is a need to supplier client Ramanathan et al. [14]. The authors presented a controller call some feature on a separate object ( ), the supplier for hexapod using SCOOP. Roboscoop is an extension of can ask the to execute it on its behalf. Such a call is separate call SCOOP’s concurrent coordination into a full-fledged robotics named a and it can be executed asynchronously. framework. In addition to SCOOP, it provides a library An object can be separate or non-separate. To distinguish
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