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

• Main Authors: Arseniy Ivin, Daniil Mikhalchenko
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: FRUCT 2017-04-01
• Series: Proceedings of the XXth Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT
• Subjects: robot; robotics; platform; asynchrony; multithreading; C++
• Online Access: https://fruct.org/publications/fruct20/files/Ivi.pdf

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.