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Sensor Network technologies are expected to be used in various kinds of application systems. Most of them, however, have been developed to work in a dedicated system. It is desired that various types of sensor networks could be operable in a same application system. To meet the requirement, we have studied middleware architecture named CMSAS (Common Middleware in Sensors, Actuators and Storages), which aims to realize virtual communications between various devices such as heterogeneous sensor networks, actuators and storages. In this paper, we propose the concept of CMSAS based on RT middleware, which was developed by National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to integrate components in robot technologies. We also discuss implementation design of CMSAS in wireless sensor networks to collect acceleration data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, the complex and diverse demands on robotic software can only be handled by large teams which are often distributed geographically, with each team working on a specific aspect of the robot's functionality. The distributed nature of development and differences in the configuration of standard robot platforms impose particular challenges on the process of system integration. To address these challenges, this paper describes the application of best practices in software engineering to the developer community of the Care-O-bot®robot family: strictly defined developer roles, management of platform dependencies by Separation of Concerns, and automated testing. The concrete implementation of these concepts in the development process is demonstrated. By analyzing development activities over the last months we can validate the impact of the concepts in the distributed community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes the task management system to decompose service request from a user into detailed robotic task plans. User's request should be simple, such as “Bring me the newspaper”. However, robotic task plan is complicated and needs to be dynamically generated depending on actual environment and system status. We propose robot profile with capability properties to select robot depending on the task requirement. We developed the task planning method to generate task plan for each robot to realize service execution. Experiment shows that our system is able to realize complex service based on simple command from the user. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Robots need to be dependable to work closely with humans. Further they must be accountable for the system design and development process. This makes some of the safety related standards such as IEC61508 adopt module based architecture and model driven engineering process. On the other hand, module-based architectures using middlewares are popular in the integration phase, when developing robot systems. To elaborate the behaviors of realtime control modules, IEC61499 function blocks derived from PLC languages is useful. Therefore, in this paper, we combine them and present a development process consisting of system design in SysML, elaboration in function blocks and integration using RTMSafety, which is an implementation of RT-middleware for the use of safety-related systems. We also show an example system for a dual-arm robot intended to work with human workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]