Reading and writing structs remotely - c++

Question

I'm currently building a robot which has some sensors attached to it. The control unit on the robot is an ARM Cortex-M3, all sensors are attached to it and it is connected via Ethernet to the "ground station".
Now I want to read and write settings on the robot via the ground station. Therefore I thought about implementing a "virtual register" on the robot that can be manipulated by the ground station.
It could be made up of structs and look like this:
// accelerometer register
struct accel_reg {
// accelerations
int32_t accelX;
int32_t accelY;
int32_t accelZ;
};
// infrared distance sensor register
struct ir_reg {
uint16_t dist; // distance
};
// robot's register table
struct {
uint8_t status; // current state
uint32_t faultFlags; // some fault flags
accel_reg accelerometer; // accelerometer register
ir_reg ir_sensors[4]; // 4 IR sensors connected
} robot;
// usage example:
robot.accelerometer.accelX = -981;
robot.ir_sensors[1].dist = 1024;
On the robot the registers will be constantly filled with new values and configuration settings are set by the ground station and applied by the robot.
The ground station and the robot will be written in C++ so they both can use the same struct datatype.
The question I have now is how to encapsulate the read/write operations in a protocol without writing tons of meta data?
Let's say I want to read the register robot.ir_sensors[2].dist. How would I address this register in my protocol?
I already thought about transmitting a relative offset in bytes (i.e the relative position in memory inside the struct) but I think memory alignment and padding may cause problems, especially because the ground station runs on a x86_64 architecture and the robot runs on a 32-bit ARM processor.
Thanks for any hints! :)

Answer 1

I'm also going to suggest Google Protocol Buffers.
In the simplest case, you could implement one message RobotState like this:
message RobotState {
optional int32_t status = 1;
optional int32_t distance = 2;
optional int32_t accelX = 3;
...
}
Then when the robot receives the message, it will take new values from any optional field that is present. It will then reply with a message containing the current value of all fields.
This way it is quite easy to implement field update using the "merge message" functionality of most protobuf implementations. Also you can keep it very simple at start because you only have one message type, but if you need to expand later you can add submessages.
It is true that protobuf does not support int8_t or int16_t. Just use int32_t instead.

Answer 2

I think the Google protocol buffers are an excellent session/presentation layer tool to use. Actually, Google protocol buffers do not support the syntax I am thinking of. So, I will change this part of my answer to recommend XSD by Code Synthesis. Although it is primarily used with XML, it supports different presentation layers such as XDR and may be more efficient than protocol buffers with large amounts of optional data. The generate code is also very nice to work with. XSD is free to use with OpenSource software and even commercial use with limited message structures.
I don't believe you want to read/write register sets at random. You can prefix a message with an enum that denotes a message such as, IR update, distance, accel, etc. These are register groups. Then the robot responds with the register set. All the registers you've given so far are sensors. The write ones must be motor control?
You want to think about what control you want to perform and the type of telemetry you would like to receive. Then come up with a message structure and bundle the information together. You could use sequence diagrams, and remote procedure API's like SOA/SOAP, RPC, REST, etc. I don't mean these RPC frameworks directly, but the concepts such as request/response and perhaps message that are just sent periodically (telemetry) without specific requests. So there would be a telemetry request from the ground station with some sort of interval and then the robot would respond periodically with unsolicited data. You always need a message id (enum above), unless your protocol is going to be stateful, which I would discourage for robustness reasons.
You haven't described how the control system might work or if you wish to do this remotely. Describing that may lead to more ideas on the protocol. I believe we are talking about layers 5,6,7 of OSI. Have fun.