Software platform for development of multimodular robotic systems with asynchronous multithreaded control

Abstract

Modern robotic complexes (RC) are equipped with lots of integrated hardware and software tools, the purposes of which are: environment analysis, communications, control of executional mechanisms and other specific features. In most cases, existing software platforms for developing RC are oriented to a very specific class of tasks, or in fact, these platforms are too “heavy” for a quick adaptation to an application task. In this article, a software platform for development of Multimodular robotic systems with asynchronous multithreaded control is proposed. The main feature of the platform is high performance of communications between modules of a robotic system, which was confirmed by experiments. For most practical robotic systems with 10 modules and transmission of 100 messages per cycle the proposed platform deals with such a load in less than 1 ms. This is significantly faster than the speed of program interaction with hardware of the robot. For instance, the average frequency of program interaction with hardware of a popular mobile robot Darwin OP was about 14 ms.