ManiWare: An Easy-to-Use Middleware for Cooperative Manipulator Teams

Manipulator teams are widely used to handle complex and cooperative tasks in various industrial applications. Although robotic middleware has emerged as the key to reducing the complexity of manipulator application development, existing works still have limitations in controlling multiple manipulators to perform tasks cooperatively. Therefore, middleware should provide programming abstraction support, coordination mechanism, and dynamic reconfiguration of motion controllers so that the manipulator teams can work efficiently. In this paper, we propose ManiWare, an easy-to-use middleware that provides a team-level programming abstraction and the manipulator-level plugin mechanism for programming and building manipulator applications. The team-level programming abstraction can facili-tate the development process, which drives the developers to focus on application logic development. Besides, the plugin mechanism configures and manages the motion controller of different components of manipulators. We implement the functional components in ManiWare and study two cases in the high-fidelity simulation engine. The utilization of ManiWare can reduce the construction difficulties of building manipulator applications.