A real-time library for the design of hybrid robot control architectures

Abstract

Describes a real-time library providing facilities useful in the design of robot control architectures. The library supports structured creation of reactive and deliberative modules, dynamic modification of relevant real-time parameters, generation of timing fault handlers, measurement and monitoring of execution times. This support enables adaptation of the rate of computation of real-time modules to the rate of change of the external world, and hence better tuning of robot behavior to the world uncertainty and dynamics. The real-time library has been put to work by designing a hybrid control architecture for a robot performing a kitting task. In the prototype experiment described in the paper, a Puma 560 robot manipulator is fed with parts by a small mobile robot. The control architecture governing Puma operations dynamically allocates computational resources to reactive and deliberative modules, according to the task level priorities.