Abstract
The article presents a software architecture to optimize the process of prototyping and deploying robot controllers that are synthesized using model-based design methodologies. The architecture is composed of a framework and a pipeline. Therefore, the contribution of the article is twofold. First, we introduce an open-source actor-oriented framework that abstracts the common robotic uses of middlewares, optimizers, and simulators. Using this framework, we then present a pipeline that implements the model-based design methodology. The components of the proposed framework are generic, and they can be interfaced with any tool supporting model-based design. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach describing the application of the resulting synchronous dataflow architecture to the design of a balancing controller for the YARP-based humanoid robot iCub. This example exploits the interfacing with Simulink® and Simulink® Coder™.
Highlights
In the past few decades, robotics has experienced a continuous shift from applications in constrained industrial environments to those involving autonomy, interaction, and collaboration with external agents
We propose a software architecture composed of a framework inspired by actor-oriented programming6 (AOP) and a pipeline for its application to robot controllers design
Present a graphical interface to visualize a model, serve an engine to initialize the directed graph of computation, provide a set of solvers to compute the output of each model element, include a library of default black-box functions, and offer a set of application programming interface (API) for interfacing with its engine
Summary
In the past few decades, robotics has experienced a continuous shift from applications in constrained industrial environments to those involving autonomy, interaction, and collaboration with external agents. The application of MBD to robotic controllers development can narrow the gap between control engineers, used to approach systems with block diagrams, and software engineers, used to procedural and OOP This approach is not exempt from the complications introduced by system integration, which often introduces time-consuming obstacles. AOP is more suitable to target the creation of applications that belong to higher abstraction layers, implementing a design principle compatible with the separation of concerns.[13,14] It represents a valid choice to ease the interconnection of self-contained black-box functionalities, which represent the building blocks of any robotic controller. We present the architecture of the proposed software framework and outline how we implemented AOP for robotic controllers design.
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