Towards a publish/subscribe control architecture for precision assembly with the Data Distribution Service

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the Data Distribution Service standard (DDS) and describes its benefits for developing robust precision assembly applications. DDS is a platform-independent standard released by the Object Management Group (OMG) for data-centric publish-subscribe systems. It allows decoupled applications to transfer information, regardless of what architecture, programming language or operating system they use. The standard is particularly designed for real-time systems that need to control timing and memory resources, have low latency and high robustness requirements. As such, DDS has the potential to provide the communication infrastructure for next generation precision assembly systems where a large number of independently controlled components need to communicate. To illustrate the benefits of DDS for precision assembly an example application is presented.