ROS As a Service: Web Services for Robot Operating System

Abstract

Robot Operating System (ROS) represents nowadays a defacto standard for the prototyping and development of software for robotics applications. It presents several software abstraction layers to robotic hardware resources allowing software developers to focus more on the software development without having to worry about the low-level hardware programming. However, developing client-side applications requires a full understanding and mastering of ROS and robotics, which is not straightforward for non-ROS users and for beginners. To overcome this limitation, it is necessary to provide an additional software abstraction layer on top of ROS to allow a seamless interaction with ROS. In this paper, we present a novel solution based on Web services to provide new programming abstraction layers to ROS based on SOAP and REST Web services. The contribution of this paper consists in proposing software architecture to expose ROS resources as SOAP and REST Web services. We present a software meta-model for the integration of Web services into ROS and we validate it through a real experimental implementation on a service robot. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the integration of Web services into ROS, and we believe that it will open new insights towards the emerging concept of Cloud Robotics.