Overview

The TTCAR (Time-triggered communication architecture for robotic systems) project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

The project started in September 2005 and will end in August 2008.

An autonomous mobile robot requires the integration of a set of sensors, actuators, and a control system. In contrast to monolithic designs with a central processor, we focus on a distributed system for the sake of parallel processing, complexity
reduction, reuse of components, maintainability, and the flexibility to change the set-up of an existing robot according to its actual task.

To achieve these goals, it is necessary to precisely define a communication architecture fulfilling the following requirements:
(i) comprehensibility -- in order to support users in the application of the system and to reduce faults induced by human
error,

(ii) real-time communication -- since the instrumentation of sensors and actuators of a mobile robot is a hard real-time
problem,

(iii) flexibility in implementation -- since the nodes of the system may be built using different processors of different
performance,

(iv) support for computer-aided set-up and configuration,

(v) support for diagnosis and maintenance.

The objective of this project is to develop a generic communication system for mobile robots that supports the interconnection of a set of distributed sensors, actuators, data processing and control nodes. The system will be based upon a time-triggered architecture and implemented for the Tinyphoon robot platform as a case study.