OpenRDK: a modular framework for robotic software development

Intense efforts to define a common structure in robotic applications, both from a conceptual and from an implementation point of view, have been carried out in the last years and several frameworks have been realized for helping in developing robotic applications. However, due to the diversity of these applications, as well as of the research groups involved, a common framework is still far from being accepted. In this paper we focus on modularity and re-usability, as major features for robotic applications. We thus characterize existing frameworks for robot software development through the choices made on concurrent execution of modules and information sharing among them and we present OpenRDK, a modular framework focused on rapid development of distributed robotic systems. OpenRDK has been designed and developed with many years of experience following users' advice and has been successfully used for the development of many diverse applications with different kinds of robots. After such an extensive test, OpenRDK is now an open source project.