Concepts of a Modular System Architecture for Distributed Robotic Systems

Modern robots often use more than one processing unit to solve the requirements in robotics. Robots are frequently designed in a modular manner to fulfill the possibility to be extended for future tasks. The use of multiple processing units leads to a distributed system within one single robot. Ther...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inComputers (Basel) Vol. 8; no. 1; p. 25
Main Authors Jahn, Uwe, Wolff, Carsten, Schulz, Peter
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 14.03.2019
Subjects
Actuators
Architecture
cloud computing
Computer architecture
Computer networks
Controllers
distributed systems
health monitoring
mobile robots
Modular design
Modular systems
Operating systems
operator–controller module (OCM)
Real time
Robotics
Robots
Sensors
single-board computer (SBC)
Software
State machines
system architectures
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Summary:Modern robots often use more than one processing unit to solve the requirements in robotics. Robots are frequently designed in a modular manner to fulfill the possibility to be extended for future tasks. The use of multiple processing units leads to a distributed system within one single robot. Therefore, the system architecture is even more important than in single-computer robots. The presented concept of a modular and distributed system architecture was designed for robotic systems. The architecture is based on the Operator–Controller Module (OCM). This article describes the adaption of the distributed OCM for mobile robots considering the requirements on such robots, including, for example, real-time and safety constraints. The presented architecture splits the system hierarchically into a three-layer structure of controllers and operators. The controllers interact directly with all sensors and actuators within the system. For that reason, hard real-time constraints need to comply. The reflective operator, however, processes the information of the controllers, which can be done by model-based principles using state machines. The cognitive operator is used to optimize the system. The article also shows the exemplary design of the DAEbot, a self-developed robot, and discusses the experience of applying these concepts on this robot.
ISSN:2073-431X
2073-431X
DOI:10.3390/computers8010025