A RESTful platform for networked robotics

As mobile robots become part of large networked infrastructures, concerns about the integration of robots into distributed applications arise. Due to the predominance of the Web protocols, it is natural mobile robots to employ such protocols for interacting over the network with other applications. Information transfer protocols such as HTTP and SOAP allow parameters to be passed in their messages, leading to a client-server interaction style based on RPC (Remote Procedure Call). As such, many robotic frameworks today employ this interaction style. An alternate interaction style is REST (Representational State Transfer). In this style, instead of focusing on operations (procedures) as in RPC, the focus is on resources. In this paper we present a RESTful (REST compliant) architecture and its implementation for mobile robots. This architecture is compared with a classical RPC-based architecture in order to illustrate the benefits of REST in the field of network robotics based on open standards.