Development of a Network-based Real-Time Robot Control System over IEEE 1394: Using Open Source Software Platform

Network-based distributed processing and hard real-time requirement significantly increase the complexity of a robot hardware and software system. This paper describes the open and modular approach to design and implement a real-time robot control system using Open Source Software (OSS) which include a Linux-based Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), Xenomai (formerly known as the fusion branch of Real Time Application Interface, RTAI/fusion), real-time IEEE 1394 device driver and other middleware components. The real-time performance of our system has been evaluated in a mobile robot control platform and we have compared the performance of our system with that of a commercial RTOS, RTLinux Pro, based system using the same set of hardware. From the comparison it is seen that our system is also capable of satisfying the similar hard-real time requirements with a greater flexibility in overall implementation. In this work, the high performance IEEE 1394 serial bus is used as the field-bus of our robot control system. Though IEEE 1394 (also known as FireWire) is widely used in consumer electronics or home video network we have successfully adopted this emerging technology in robot control and as a side effect of our research, we have seen that IEEE 1394 can be used as a better alternative to the old generation slower filed-bus like CAN bus.