ManiWare: An Easy-to-Use Middleware for Cooperative Manipulator Teams

Manipulator teams are frequently employed in various industrial applications to handle challenging cooperative tasks. The complicated interaction between manipulators makes it difficult to design applications from scratch. Although robotics middleware has emerged as the key to lowering the development complexity of manipulator applications, existing works still have limitations in controlling multiple manipulators to carry out tasks cooperatively. To overcome the limitations, middleware should provide programming abstraction support, coordination mechanism, and dynamic reconfiguration of motion controllers so that a team of manipulators can work together efficiently. This work proposes ManiWare, an easy-to-use middleware that provides the team-level programming abstraction and the manipulator-level plugin mechanism for programming and configuring manipulator applications. The team-level programming abstraction can facilitate the development process by invoking the functions from the fundamental cooperation components, which drives the developers to focus on designing application logic. Besides, the plugin mechanism dynamically configures and manages the motion controller of different parts of manipulators, making the reconfiguration feasible. This work implements ManiWare and evaluates the task execution performance with three case studies in the high-fidelity simulation platform. The experimental results demonstrate that ManiWare facilitates cooperative tasks with a high success rate, efficient completion time, and marginal runtime overhead. The source code is at https://github.com/sundycoder/maniware.