OSCAR. An open software concept for autonomous robots

Abstract

Programming robotic applications is hardly standardized. A major reason for this is the very special hardware equipment applied to the robot and the aim the software is written for. As a result, a modular approach including easy maintenance and reusability of the modules is difficult to realize with the systems currently available on the market. OSCAR therefore has been designed as a general purpose concept to create modular robotic software written in C++. It declares four software layers, each boundary representing a well defined step of abstraction from hardware related to high level related data and services. Data and services are handled by OSCAR's task management without any knowledge of their specific contents. OSCAR is designed to run even sophisticated applications in a "cheap" environment (PCs+Windows 3.11 or microcontrollers). The lack of real-time support and efficient multitasking mechanisms in DOS made us implement it in OSCAR; currently a priority driven multitasking management with soft and hard real-time capabilities, event handling and distributed execution on several machines is provided. OSCAR is running on two mobile platforms with different hardware structures and kinematics to prove its functionality.