Robotics Service Bus

h1. ROS Comparison

h2. Scope

Please note: We are comparing RSB against roscore (or even ros_comm?) not against ROS!

and YARP_OS?

h2. Functional Differences

| *Aspect*           | *ROS*                      | *YARP*       | *RSB*                 |

| Pub/sub Topology   | 1:1                        | m:n          | m:n                   |

| Abstraction        | single level               | single level | hierarchies           |

| Channel Identifier | Topic                      | Scope        |                       |

| Channel Scope      | Flat                       | Scope        | Hierarchical          |

| Origin Filtering   | ?                          | Scope        | planned               |

| Typing             | strong                     | Scope        | strong-ish            |

| IDL                | yes, proprietary           | Scope        | optional              |

| QoS                | implicit                   | Scope        | explicit              |

| Introspection      | strong                     | Scope        | implicit by multicast |

| Centralized        | yes (master, param server) | Scope        | no                    |

Communication Patterns

| *Aspect*           | *ROS*                      | *YARP*       | *RSB*                 | 

| Push-receiver      | yes                        | ?            | yes                   |

| Pull-receiver      | ?                          | ?            | yes                   |

h2. Non-functional Properties

* Lock-in

* Architecture

* Openness

** Use of standards/terminology

** Protocol Specification

** Source Code Documentation

** Project Layout/Source code organization

* Programming Language Support

h2. Wishes

* We believe in the power of reflection and self-description, such that

** a generic content-based subscription model, e.g., with path-based access such as XPath becomes feasible

** messages can be generally understood by everyone even if parts are not accessible

* RSB shall provide better introspection features, both for programmatic access (e.g., for anomaly detection) but also for developers

* Reduced framework lock-in