RHEA: a reactive, heterogeneous, extensible, and abstract framework for dataflow programming

Robotics and IoT applications are perfect candidates that can benefit from the functional reactive programming paradigm. Moreover, since a typical program can be represented as a dataflow graph, the application can be conceptually separated and distributed in different machines and the several graph partitions can run in parallel and possibly in different execution stacks. In this paper we propose a general-purpose reactive framework that can express complex applications, seamlessly and transparently integrating different sources and middlewares. The framework is abstract and extensible, making it easy to integrate with well-established technologies that rely on the PubSub model. We demonstrate the usability of the framework by providing application examples in the domain of robotics and IoT.