Flexible Image Acquisition Service for Distributed Robotic Systems

Abstract

The widespread use vision systems in robotics introduces a number of challenges related to management of image acquisition and image processing tasks, as well as their coupling to the robot control function. With the proliferation of more distributed setups and flexible robotic architectures, the workflow of image acquisition needs to support a wider variety of communication styles and application scenarios. This paper presents FxIS, a flexible image acquisition service targeting distributed robotic systems with event-based communication. The principal idea a FxIS is in composition of a number of execution threads with a set of concurrent data structures, supporting acquisition from multiple cameras that is closely synchronized in time, both between the cameras and with the request timestamp.