ETHNOS: a light architecture for real-time mobile robotics

Autonomous mobile robots have to perform a multiplicity of concurrent activities to carry out useful tasks while quickly reacting to sensorial inputs in a dynamic, partially unknown environment. The paper discusses the operating system requirements of a mobile robotic system, by focusing on the timing and communication requirements of the involved tasks. A distributed software architecture is proposed which implements a hybrid (pre-emptive/non-pre-emptive) task scheduling policy and a dedicated inter-task communication protocol, offering an efficient programming interface for the development of soft real-time robotic applications.