Reliable Robot Communication on Web Services

Remote-robot-control study and standardization have mainly focused on real-time mission-critical communication. As robot technology expands in non-industrial areas such as entertainment and home use, a more flexible communication is required to realize communication between robots and between robots and computers in open/public network space, which need not be real-time or mission-critical. The RoboLink Protocol, developed as a standardized protocol for such communication, is based on Web services technology to ensure flexibility. We discuss requirements for robot communication reliability, an important practical issue, especially in loosely coupled environments, wireless networks, and WANs. To ensure reliability, we propose combining two solutions: one for the transport layer using standard messaging technology and the other for the application layer implementing transaction behavior with recovery for fatal failures. We provide a guideline for developers on how to implement recovery easily in their applications. We confirmed the feasibility of our proposal using sample implementation developed as a plug-in handler for the Web server.