ORC - A Lightweight, Lightning-Fast Middleware

Felix Frank, Alexandros Paraschos, Patrick van der Smagt

Abstract: Robotic tasks are commonly solved by integrating numerous different software and hardware modules into one working application. The necessary integration work typically contributes a considerable share of the total work required for a project, which is why past research on robotics computing has pushed towards generating higher-level abstraction layers, like middlewares. However, the current state-of-the-art cannot provide reliable, low-latency communication performance as we will show in the experimental evaluation. In this paper we propose the Open Robot Communication framework (ORC). Compared to previous middlewares, ORC is lightweight and geared towards applications with high-performance requirements. We consider ORC especially useful for applications with Human Robot Interaction or collaborative tasks involving multiple robots. In the paper, we compare the runtime performance of ORC to the robot operating system (ROS). We can show that ORC enables message transfer with delays far below one millisecond and we demonstrate the real-time capabilities of ORC in a force-control task implemented in Python.