A real-time control system for multi-robot applications
Lei Yu · 2019
Robotic technologies have been developed significantly from capability limited automated robots to sophisticated robots. Different robots consist of varying heterogeneous components including motors, encoders, torque sensor, and vision system. The heterogeneity strengthens the coupling of components and limits the scalability, compatibility, and feasibility of the system. Furthermore, the required breadth of expertise makes it difficult for researchers and engineers to develop customized applications on the robotic platform. To address the challenges abovementioned, in this thesis, we developed a hierarchical control system for multi-robot applications, bounding the complexity inside the layers. The system contains a deep stack starting from low-level drivers, continuing up through real-time communication, trajectory generator and robot cooperation. By leveraging trajectory generator and hard real-time communication channel, an innovative motion command is implemented to synchronize multi-robot trajectories. By conducting experiments of three different applications, we show how our control kernel is successfully applied to coordinate the motion of independent robots.