Prime: A Service-oriented Framework with Minimal Communication Overheads

We present Prime, a framework for development of service-oriented control systems in robotics. Prime uses an original approach to services: the service is not a monolith, but is subdivided into three layers. This approach allows creating services´ internal logic without references to communication-related entities, and therefore almost without initial learning of Prime. In addition, Prime offers three methods of linking services together that are completely interchangeable and compatible. The first is a classic service-oriented solution; the second belongs more to functional programming, it combines the algorithms inside each service into one function, that is equivalent to the behavior of the service-oriented system. The third uses code emission technique to significantly increase the performance. The Prime adds little overheads and is much faster than, for example, Microsoft Robotics Studio.