Flexible Signal-Oriented Hardware Abstraction for Rapid Prototyping of Robotic Systems

Diffuse and changing specifications for the design of light-weight robots result in high design costs for the desired robotic system, especially the electronic modules and related software drivers. To reduce those costs, we created a flexible robot platform, consisting of FPGA joint modules that are connected by a high speed communication. To fully exploit the hardware flexibility, we introduce a flexible signal-oriented hardware abstraction that is based on a signal flow oriented middleware (SFMiddleware). SFMiddleware enables the transparent integration of changing joint hardware functionality with robot control applications. Utilizing a static system specification approach, we benefit from the abstraction of a middleware without the typical overhead of common middleware implementations. Thus, we achieve a small run-time footprint and control cycles of more than 10 kHz