Open system real time architecture and software design for robot control

Robotics equipment used in research studies or industrial prototyping often require reconfiguration of some hardware/software architectures and algorithms for new experiments and trials. Such requirements highlight the interest in new "open" control system architectures, interacting with suitable applications for software development in order to reduce and simplify the project cycle. This paper shows an application based on one of these systems, the OpenDSP, which allows an easy reconfiguration of a DSP-based hardware for different applications. An interesting feature of the developed system is given by its full integration with the Matlab environment. OpenDSP is developed by the Mechatronics Laboratory of Politecnico di Torino, Italy.