Time Triggered Communication Architecture f. Robot Systems

An autonomous mobile robot requires the integration of a set of sensors, actuators, and a control system. In contrast to monolithic designs wich a central processor, we focus an a distributed system for the Bake of parallel processing, complexity reduction, reuse of components, maintainability, and the flexibility to change the sec-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 sec 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 Gase study.