Development of Common Platform Technology for Next-Generation Robots

Abstract

Various research and development projects for robots have been carried out by a large number of research groups. However, many research groups spend a lot of time and money to develop the basic robotic hardware and software for each application field, which might be used as infrastructure. In addition, apart from the market for industrial robots, markets for service robots are few and tiny. The application-independent technology for robots of any kind, which can be used by most robot developers and engineers, is defined as common platform In order to increase the efficiency of future robot research and development, the establishment of the platform technology is a matter of urgency. The platform is relevant to recent topics in robotics, including robotics structured environment, networked robot, robot middleware, reorganized dynamic simulator, and so on. In order to develop next-generation robots capable of working in complex and dynamic environments, and not just in factories, the is a key technology. For example, the position information of the robots, objects and the humans in the working environment are required for any robotic application and might make the working environment closer to the structured environment, such as those in factories, using information technology (IT). In the information-structured environment, the robots can work as if they were in factories well organized in terms of the working environment for robots. If this position information can be acquired on the basis of a infrastructure, then research or development of the next-generation robots can be executed more efficiently. Although Smart Room (Pentland, 1995), Aware Home (Kidd et al., 1999), Intelligent Space (Lee & Hashimoto, 2002; Lee et al., 2004), and Robotic Room (Sato et al., 2004) related to the information-structured environment have been developed, they are not considered as the robotic infrastructure. On the other hand, software technology applied as the platform technology, such as a robot simulator, is also an important issue. Although there is a lot of robot software developed in the world and several robot simulators (Gerkey et al., 2003; Michel, 2004; Nesnas et al., 2006; Gates, 2007; Lee et al., 2007), there are few simulators that guarantee the consistency of software modules. The simulator would be able to simulate the performance