Overview
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.