Abstract
The widespread use of robotics in new application domains outside the industrial workplace settings requires robotic systems which demonstrate functionalities far beyond that of classical industrial robotic machines. The implementation of these capabilities inevitably increases the complexity of the robotic hardware, control a and software components. This chapter introduces the XBot software architecture for robotics, which is capable of Real-Time (RT) performance with minimum jitter at relatively high control frequency while demonstrating enhanced flexibility and abstraction features making it suitable for the control of robotic systems of diverse hardware embodiment and complexity. A key feature of the XBot is its cross-robot compatibility, which makes possible the use of the framework on different robots, without code modifications, based only on a set of configuration files. The design of the framework ensures easy interoperability and built-in integration with other existing software tools for robotics, such as ROS, YARP or OROCOS, thanks to a robot agnostic API called XBotInterface. The framework has been successfully used and validated as a software infrastructure for collaborative robotic arms as KUKA lbr iiwa/lwr 4+ and Franka Emika Panda, other than humanoid robots such as WALK-MAN and COMAN+, and quadruped centaur-like robots as CENTAURO.
Highlights
Nowadays effective robotic solutions targeting new applications outside the traditional industrial environment, are supposed to operate in partially known spaces with unforeseen uncertainty and increased variability in the application tasks
The considerations and limitations of the existing frameworks, described in detail in the previous section, motivated the development of the XBot framework bearing in mind that the design of a software platform, which lies at the foundations of such complex and diverse robotic systems, is the most crucial phase in the software development process
The possibility to simulate the robot and its controllers behaviors prior to testing on the real hardware is essential, especially when dealing with complex robotic systems. To achieve this we provide an R-Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) implementation for the well known Gazebo5 simulator environment Figure 3
Summary
Nowadays effective robotic solutions targeting new applications outside the traditional industrial environment, are supposed to operate in partially known spaces with unforeseen uncertainty and increased variability in the application tasks. To be effective, they have to adapt rapidly and seemly their functionalities in these demands, leading to an increase of the complexity in each layer of the robotic system, from the hardware to the high level control. Several software frameworks for robotics have been developed in the past twenty years, as stated in [1], aiming to provide flexible infrastructures, which permit the seamless integration of new functionalities and interfaces in the robotic system, and ensure standardization, easy tracking and maintenance of the software development, despite the increased complexity. A software middleware needs to abstract the complex hardware (e.g. actuators and sensors) of the robot providing an easy-to-use, standardized Application Programming Interface (API). The HAL can provide a relatively uniform abstraction layer that assures portability and code reuse: it permits the development of control modules that can be ported from one robot to another
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