Communications and Messaging Frameworks

A common problem for any distributed software project is handling inter process communications and messaging. Luckily, a number of frameworks already exist to solve this issue. Robotics projects tend to have a range of requirements, from providing a higher level cognitive architecture framework (typically a set of interacting components or nodes) to low-level realtime communications (e.g. CANbus, RT ethernet).

Some robotics packages already provide a particular architecture, such as ImprovCV and ROS which are both filter based, or MRPT which provides some IPC primitives. However, this problem is hardly limited to robotics and many real time distributed networking/processing systems have similar communications requirements. (e.g. computer games, or traffic management systems / plant control systems).

The communications frameworks can be broadly grouped into three categories:

1. Integrated middlewear for a larger package
   
2. (hard) Real time control orientated frameworks
   
3. (soft) Real time messaging libraries
   

From a games perspective, the people at second life have a nice evaluation of several messaging systems. Beginning with soft real time messaging, some interesting libraries include:

• Google protocol buffers, for serialisation. I mention it, because it is popular.
  
• MessagePack is a language agnostic message serialisation system similar to Google protocol buffers - just faster and better.
  
• CORBA allows objects to be sent around a network, often used in business applications. It is an open standard and language agnostic as it includes an Interface Definition Language to define components.
  
• Microsoft DCOM / .NET remote and its many variants are similar to CORBA, just the Microsoft variant.
  
• Apache ActiveMQ another enterprise orientated message broker with support for a large number of scripting languages (Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc).
  
• RakNet manages distributed objects, primarily targeted towards computer games (used in Unity).
  


• Open Torque Networking Library has its origins in the Torque game engine designed for massively multiplayer games.
  


• YAMI4 is a fairly advanced but easy to use peer to peer messaging framework for control systems that is easy to extend to a pub/sub system. POSIX, Windows, Java, C++, well worth a look.
  


• 0MQ, zero MQ is a messaging system that is socket based, and also has pub/sub extensions.
  


• Socket.IO hardly qualifies for a framework, but is a great enabler for realtime HTML communications, so it certainly deserves a mention.
  

there are many more networking libraries available, but these are the ones that stand out for this category. For hard real-time control tasks the choices are a bit more limited, however libraries of note are:

• Real time CORBA, is CORBA modified to be a bit more lightweight and able to support real time requirements. TAO ACE is worth looking into if your following this path.
  
• Data Distribution Service (DDS) is similar to Real time CORBA, however it has the advantage of lessons learnt from CORBA and provides simpler fine grained control over quality of service and intelligent networking. RTI DDS is the framework we used for the WAMbot TARDEC/DSTO MAGIC 2010 project. OpenDDS is an open source implementation.
  
• Real time data base (RTDB) is an open source framework that provides a lower-level communications interface for C/C++ over Xenomai. This is the framework we used for the Team Annieway entry to the DARPA Urban Challenge.
  
• LCM is a socket-based IPC library used by Team Michigan for MAGIC 2010.
  
• IPC a low level inter process communications system for embedded systems used by NASA.
  
• Dynamic Data eXchange (DDX) is a large open source distributed software architecture developed by CSIRO and has been previously integrated with ROS.
  

Finally, there are a number of application specific frameworks, for Robotics this includes ROS, MS Robot Studio, Player/Stage, JAUS and more general packages such as Labview and Matlab. I think it is prudent for every software developer to be familiar with at least three tiers of communications frameworks, from large scale frameworks (e.g. CORBA) to light-weight frameworks (e.g. RackNet) to low-level frameworks (e.g. Socket.IO). Ideally, one for each key application area (e.g. Hard real time, Soft real time, Business applications, Web).