# A containerised approach for multiform robotic applications

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a container-based method to simplify and scale the integration of diverse robotic systems.

## Contribution

A novel containerised approach for integrating multiform robotic architectures with third-party contributions.

## Key findings

- The containerised approach simplifies and increases the flexibility of robotic system setup.
- Computational overhead is negligible due to optimal resource usage.
- The method was successfully benchmarked on the EU H2020 SecondHands robotic architecture.

## Abstract

As the area of robotics achieves promising results, there is an increasing need to scale robotic software architectures towards real-world domains. Traditionally, robotic architectures are integrated using common frameworks, such as ROS. Therefore, systems with a uniform structure are produced, making it difficult to integrate third party contributions. Virtualisation technologies can simplify the problem, but their use is uncommon in robotics and general integration procedures are still missing. This paper proposes and evaluates a containerised approach for designing and integrating multiform robotic architectures. Our approach aims at augmenting preexisting architectures by including third party contributions. The integration complexity and computational performance of our approach is benchmarked on the EU H2020 SecondHands robotic architecture. Results demonstrate that our approach grants simplicity and flexibility of setup when compared to a non-virtualised version. The computational overhead of using our approach is negligible as resources were optimally exploited.