Resource Management for Robotic Applications

This paper presents Robotic Application Resource Management Services (RARMS), a collection of tools for integrating reusable software components of a wide class of robotic applications on Microsoft Windows, a general-purpose, commodity operating system. RARMS includes (1) a resource allocation tool called RAAPT-HV for partitioning the available processors into a specified number of virtual processors, allocating available resources to virtual processors and assigning robotic software components to virtual processors and (2) a robot-class scheduling service (RC SS) which helps independently developed components prioritize relative to each other in a way that is consistent with their timing requirements. These tools aim to provide time-sensitive components with satisfactory responsiveness in an open environment without serious impact on the performance of other components. To demonstrate the effectiveness of RARMS, we adopted for experimentation and evaluation purposes several commonly-used components of delivery robots, including face detection, speech recognition, video streaming and path planning. The results of our experiments showed that these tools can help to achieve satisfactory performance for these software components of robotic applications.