OPRoS_M: a library to develop a H/W device component of OPRoS platform

The software of a component-based robot system communicates with the robot's hardware through device components. It causes communication overhead and inconvenience in that the device components wrapping the device drivers are implemented again for component-level communication. This paper proposes a software library, OPRoS_M, in order to use a robot controller as an independent single device component for the OPRoS framework without either installing a robot device driver or implementing a robot device component again. OPRoS_M was developed in C with several resource management mechanisms which lead to efficient performance for the MCU/DSP processors of the controller. In order to test the performance of OPRoS_M, it was ported to a Cortex-M4-based platform, which was then tested with other components in the OPRoS execution engine. It worked properly, and the performance results show that the latency between the OPRoS_M device component and other OPRoS components was similar or less than that between components in the OPRoS execution engine. Also, repeated request packets at 1 kHz frequency from the OPRoS component could be processed by the OPRoS_M device component.