Distributed real-time computing in autonomous robots using time-triggered and message-triggered objects (TMOs)

Distributed real-time computing is one of the enabling technologies in establishing a team of autonomous robots. A team of soccer playing robots, Paderkicker, contains many computing nodes handling environment perception, artificial intelligence, team coordination, autonomous actuation, and interactions with external entities such as a remote server. Robots must act with varying degrees of autonomy in real-time. The time-triggered message-triggered object (TMO) programming scheme offers a high-level high-precision approach to programming of distributed real-time computing operations. The TMO programmer can apply deadlines to method executions and result-arrivals in a straightforward way. He is thus relieved from dealing with low-level resource allocation details and can show considerably increased productivity. This paper describes a TMO structuring approach for constructing teams of autonomous robots. A TMO network architecture is described for the Paderkicker team.