General software architecture for multi-sensor information fusion system

In this paper, a general software architecture for multisensor fusion system (MFS) in dynamic environment is described. The architecture has the characteristics of robustness, dynamically reconfigurable framework, "plug-in-play" for sensor, and the predictability of sensor action. According to requirements of MFS, the real-time operating system (RTOS) is applied in this software architecture. The result is an RTOS-based software architecture, which consists of five kinds of tasks: sensor sampling task (SST), sensor data processing task (SDPT), fusion task (FT), management task (MT) and man/machine interface task (MMIT). A calligraphic robot has been designed and developed in our lab based on the software architecture proposed.