A six-legged robot: real-time issues and architecture

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Mobile robot systems often operate under real-time constraints imposed by the interactions with the world in which they act. Such timing constraints are typically assigned to the various software activities (acquisition, control and actuation tasks) that run on the robot controller, and need to be enforced by the operating system that support the application. To reduce weight and power consumption, however, battery-operated robots are usually controlled by small microcontrollers with little computational power and memory capacity. As a consequence, predictability as well as high efficiency is required from the real-time kernel to enforce timing constraints on application tasks. In this paper we describe a robot control architecture specifically developed for supporting real-time applications in small mobile robots with limited resources. The proposed real-time system has been used to control the behavior of a six-legged walking robot, where the motion of each leg has to be synchronized with the other based on the walking parameters.