XBotCore: A Real-Time Cross-Robot Software Platform

In this work we introduce XBotCore (Cross-Bot-Core), a light-weight, Real-Time (RT) software platform for EtherCAT-based robots. XBotCore is open-source and is designed to be both an RT robot control framework and a software middleware. It satisfies hard RT requirements, while ensuring 1 kHz control loop even in complex Multi-Degree-Of-Freedom systems. It provides a simple and easy-to-use middleware Application Programming Interface (API), for both RT and non-RT control frameworks. This API is completely flexible with respect to the framework a user wants to utilize. Moreover it is possible to reuse the code written using XBotCore API with different robots (cross-robot feature). In this paper, the XBotCore design and architecture will be described and experimental results on the humanoid robot WALK-MAN [17], developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), will be presented.