Objective of RT-middleware contests

This paper gives a brief overview of the robot-technology (RT) middleware Contest. To improve the efficiency of software development for robotic systems, we plan to develop a common robot architecture based on software modularization. To realize the reusability and interoperability of software modules, we are promoting RT middleware technology through an open-source programing contest. The RT middleware Contest, which started in 2007, has been held each year as an organized session at the System Integration Division Annual Conference hosted by the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers. The contest is now co-hosted with the Conference for Promotion of Robot Business, the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. The contest targets software libraries useful for building RT systems, RT components for specific hardware devices, and so on. Most of the prizes in this contest are established by cooperative and individual sponsors, and the award system was designed as a kind of voting system in which better entries received incentive award through a screening process based on the sponsors´ own evaluation axis. In order to share and store robot technologies, source codes and manuals of all contest works can be downloaded from the OpenRTM-aist official website.