Auto-generating real-time capable robotics control software for highly reconfigurable robot platforms

This paper presents a novel implementation of the CASAH (Control Autonomy for Sampling and Handling) robotics software system used in research and technology development testbeds at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Our implementation divides control software into decoupled behavior, user-interface, and hardware-level bus modules. This decoupling at the module level is accomplished by auto-generating human-readable message types that are tailored to the exact hardware topology of whatever system is currently in use. These message types provide modules with a common framework for exchanging state information and relaying commands to devices while being agnostic to the communication protocol itself. We also detail how to structure behavior and bus modules to facilitate modularity and flexibility with third-party software. This software package has been used with success on multiple technology development testbeds at JPL, an example of which is given in this paper, and has proven to provide developers a lightweight and highly reconfigurable system for efficient debugging and practical code sharing.