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Distributed Robotic Computing

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Robotics

  • 398 Accesses

Synonyms

Robot operating system (ROS); Robotic software middleware

Definitions

Computing hardware in modern robotic platforms ranges from embedded microcontrollers to general-purpose CPU. To implement complex software applications, it is therefore common practice to separate computation in different components, whose execution is concurrent and distributed on the available hardware. Components in a distributed application exchange information – typically through a wired or wireless network – and are coordinated to obtain the desired behavior of the robot. Robotic researchers adopt software middleware to simplify the task of writing distributed applications and increase code reuse. The goals of this entry are to illustrate the general concepts of a software middleware, revise the specific middleware adopted in robotics, and discuss open problems that remain to be addressed.

Overview

A robot application is often too complex to be executed on a single processing unit. This complexity may...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Humanoid Sensing and Perception, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy

    Lorenzo Natale

Authors
  1. Lorenzo Natale
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lorenzo Natale .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Marcelo H. Ang

  2. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oussama Khatib

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Bruno Siciliano

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Management Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, Dalmine, Italy

    Davide Brugali

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Natale, L. (2020). Distributed Robotic Computing. In: Ang, M., Khatib, O., Siciliano, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_4-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_4-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41610-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41610-1

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