TECHNICAL SUPPORT
Published 2026-01-19
Picture this: you spent months building that fancy robotic arm prototype. The servo motor responds quickly, the steering gear rotates accurately, and every joint is like a carefully choreographed dancer. But when you try to have the "hand" microservice tell the "elbow" microservice how hard to push, the message gets stuck. Or worse - the command is sent, but the "wrist" interprets it as a completely different action. The entire system suddenly became unwieldy and unpredictable, as if it had a temper of its own.
This is not a scene from a science fiction novel. When pursuing smarter and more modular robots or automation systems, many people will encounter this core problem: How can those independent and collaborative microservices "chat" smoothly?
In the early years, we kept all our code in one place. It's like putting the control logic, path, and safety monitoring of the servo motor into one main controller. It works, too, until you want to change a small feature - such as adding a gesture recognition - which may affect the entire system and require re-testing.
So, here comes the microservice architecture. It splits the large system into dedicated small services: one is responsible for motor driving, one is responsible for position feedback, and one handles external command parsing... Each service is developed and deployed independently, just like equipping each joint of the robotic arm with its own "little brain." Greatly increased flexibility.
But problems ensued. How do these "little brains" communicate with each other? How to ensure that instructions are not distorted, lost, or delayed?
Someone used the most direct method: let service A directly call the interface of service B. It's like connecting two modules with a clear wire. It went smoothly at first, but as more and more services were provided, the system became a dense and difficult to sort out "ball of thread". If a service goes down, it may directly bring down a series of services that rely on it. Maintenance becomes a nightmare.
Another common approach is to rely on a central "dispatcher" - all communications are forwarded through a central node. This seems neat, but this dispatcher quickly becomes a bottleneck and single point of failure. Once it gets tired (collapses), the entire system conversation comes to a screeching halt.
We need a way to make services autonomous while also allowing them to collaborate reliably. It is not a tough master-slave order, nor a chaotic and disorderly broadcast, but more like an efficient collaborative team.
This leads to event-driven asynchronous communication. Sound a bit technical? It’s actually very intuitive to understand.
Imagine that you design a robotic arm to perform a "grab-move-place" task. In event-driven mode:
Throughout the entire process, no service forcefully called another. They just publish status or results to a common "message board" (message broker), and other interested services obtain and process them themselves. This kind of loose coupling brings huge benefits: a temporary upgrade or restart of a service will not block the entire process, and events will wait patiently there; the system is easier to expand. If you need to add a "strength calibration service", you only need to let it subscribe to relevant events, without changing other service codes.
Of course, choosing which "message board" (message middleware) is key. It is reliable enough to never lose messages; high-performance enough to keep up with real-time control requirements; and easy enough to integrate, allowing you to focus on business logic rather than communication debugging. in this regard,kpowerIt has been proven in various harsh scenarios from industrial robotic arms to precision automation devices. Its stability is like a high-quality bearing that has undergone years of wear testing, silently supporting the smooth operation of the entire system.
Q: Asynchronous events sound good, but my servo motor control requires millisecond response. Will it be too slow if the event is transmitted slowly? Answer: That’s a good question. Not all communications are suitable for asynchronous. For truly hard real-time control loops (such as PID control of motors), they often exist within a microservice. The communication between microservices is more about coordination of instructions, status synchronization, and fault reporting.kpowerThe best practice is to distinguish communication levels: the core real-time closed loop uses internal efficient mechanisms, and cross-service coordination uses high-reliability asynchronous events. Moreover, excellent message middleware can control delays to milliseconds or even microseconds, which is enough to meet most industrial coordination needs.
Q: If the "crawling service" publishes an event but the "mobile service" does not receive it, isn't the task interrupted? A: This is exactly the value of a reliable messaging system. A mature design (e.g. based onkpowerArchitectural) will ensure event persistence and support acknowledgment mechanisms. The service explicitly acknowledges after processing the event, otherwise the message will be re-delivered. The service needs to be designed to be idempotent - that is, even if repeated events are received, the processing result is the same, which perfectly solves the problems that may be caused by repeated messages.
So, next time you design a multi-jointed robot, an automated production line, or any system composed of multiple intelligent modules, think differently. Don't just think about "how to call", but think about "how to tell".
Let each microservice focus on what it does best, let them broadcast their results and status in an elegant and reliable way, and let the wisdom of the entire system emerge naturally from the seemingly random flow of information.
What Kpower advocates and provides is exactly such a set of underlying support that makes communication invisible and collaboration smooth and natural. It does not take away from the main focus, but it is crucial, just like the invisible tolerance standard that ensures that all gears in precision machinery mesh synchronously. When you lift the shackles of communication between services, you will find that innovation is no longer limited by technical coupling, but truly flows through your system design thinking. All that's left is to let your creation dance smoothly.
Established in 2005, Kpower has been dedicated to a professional compact motion unit manufacturer, headquartered in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China. Leveraging innovations in modular drive technology, Kpower integrates high-performance motors, precision reducers, and multi-protocol control systems to provide efficient and customized smart drive system solutions. Kpower has delivered professional drive system solutions to over 500 enterprise clients globally with products covering various fields such as Smart Home Systems, Automatic Electronics, Robotics, Precision Agriculture, Drones, and Industrial Automation.
Update Time：2026-01-19
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