Turtlebot at Office: A Service-Oriented Software Architecture for Personal Assistant Robots Using ROS

This paper presents the design of an assistive mobile robot to support people in their everyday activities in office and home environments. The contribution of this paper consists in the design of a modular component-based software architecture that provides different abstraction layers on top of Robot Operating System (ROS) to make easier the design and development of service robots with ROS. The first abstraction layer is the COROS framework composed of complementary software subsystems providing different interfaces between ROS and the client applications. The second abstraction layer is the integration of Web services into ROS to allow client applications to seamlessly and transparently interact with the robot while hiding all implementation details. The proposed software architecture was validated through a experimental prototype of Turtlebot deployed in University campus. Furthermore, we outline the challenges incurred during experimentation and focus on lessons learned throughout the implementation and deployment.