Robot Vision for RT-Middleware Framework

In conventional robot system development the different robot parts (sensors, processing elements, actuators) are combined together in a compact, self contained system. The need for faster development, system reconfigurability and flexibility required the introduction of middleware frameworks for robot systems. One promising middleware framework is the RT-middleware technology (and its implementation named OpenRTM-aist), which is getting more and more popular in robot system design. Vision sensors are one of the most important sensors in robot systems. When constructing a new robot system, it is desirable that vision and image processing components are just as easily integrated as any other robot components. Unfortunately, RT-middleware is not yet equipped with such RT-components. This need can be satisfied by introducing a new image processing toolbox, directly obtained from DIMAN, a existing software previously developed by the authors. DIMAN is a distributed framework for image processing, with a modular architecture very similar to RT-middleware. The modules of DIMAN satisfy the needs of robot systems with respect to vision related tasks. Through experimental results usability of DIMAN in robot vision will be shown in this paper. Furthermore DIMAN module deployment in RT-middleware based robot systems will be introduced also.