SAN JOSE, CA — RoboDevelopment — October 25, 2007 — Objective Interface Systems (OIS), provider of the most widely deployed communications middleware for real-time and embedded systems, today announced the OIS Robotics Platform, a complete communications infrastructure which simplifies development and sets a new security standard for robotics systems.

Robotic systems are growing increasingly complex, from autonomous security robots and home robots to large-scale industrial robotic equipment. Despite this complexity, robotic systems must communicate easily and reliably with each other as well as with manned platforms. The OIS Robotic Platform supplies a highly reliable off-the-shelf solution for seamlessly enabling the processing of the massive amounts of visual, auditory and sensory programming and data contributing to all this complexity.

The OIS Robotics Platform features a trio of Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) products: ORBexpress® RT, ORBexpress DSP and ORBexpress FPGA, OIS's high-performance communications middleware products. The OIS Robotics Platform supports a wide variety of hardware architectures commonly used in robotics: general purpose processors (GPPs), digital signal processors (DSPs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This multiple-device support lets robotics designers develop logic once on a common platform and then deploy to specific device hardware as desired. This preserves a company's investment in both software and hardware while compressing the time-to-market for new robots.

The OIS Robotics Platform also integrates with the world's first high-assurance communications security software, PCSexpress™. Once implemented in a robot, for example, PCSexpress ensures the authorization of any entity communicating with a robot and the integrity of the data with military-grade cryptography. PCSexpress secures robotics systems against hackers, against errors in the network infrastructure, and against unauthorized users, even within a plant.

"CORBA has long been a standard of robotics systems," said Joe Jacob, Senior Vice President of Objective Interface Systems (OIS). CORBA IDL — which OIS's communications middleware fully supports — allows systems designers to optimize overall throughput of their system without rewriting their communications protocols every time they move features between GPPs, DSPs and FPGAs. By uniformly supporting all these processor types, the OIS Robotics Platform promotes code re-use, allowing designers to roll out multiple product generations quickly, re-using the existing application logic."

The OIS Robotics Platform Features:

• A family of standards-based CORBA Object Request Brokers (ORBs) which provides a flexible, upgradeable and high-performance communications infrastructure for robotics systems;
  
• A complete middleware solution in a very small footprint — which is especially important for power-constrained robots;
  
• Support for partial reconfigurability on the FPGA, which simplifies programming while significantly increasing application code reuse; this is critical in sophisticated systems such as automotive assembly plants, which often require field upgradeability of robotics systems;
  
• Support for high-security communications through PCSexpress, the only commercially available communications product designed for the highest levels of security, including High Robustness;
  
• Support for multiple pluggable transports with Quality of Service (QoS), such as TCP/IP, UDP, Shared Memory, Ethernet, PCI, PCI Express and RDMA technologies (e.g, RapidIO™ and INFINIBAND), takes care of communications throughout the system without requiring any rewriting of transport protocols.