A RESTfull architecture for enabling rapid development and deployment of companion robot applications

The need for companion robots is growing with the dual factors of an aging population and the limited infrastructure/social support. Robots capable of assisting people in daily tasks and providing various services represent part of the solution for the future. The lack of reusable platforms is a significant obstacle to such solutions. In this paper, we propose an architecture that can enable the development and deployment of companion robot applications to assist elderly and disabled people. The architecture consists of a set of components at different layers, ranging from low-level robotics services to end user application components. The multiple layers interact through RESTful web services. This architecture enables the development of a range of applications, and can deal with robots that have varying capabilities and hardware.