Design of an Operator-Controller Based Distributed Robotic System

Modern robots often use more than one processing unit to solve the requirements in robotics. Mobile robots are more and more designed in a modular manner to fulfill the possibility to be extended for future tasks. The usage of multiple processing units leads into a distributed system within one single robot. Therefore, the (software) architecture is even more important than in single-computer robots. The presented DAEbot was designed to implement the Operator-Controller Module (OCM) on a mobile robot. This OCM has been used in other technical systems and splits the system hierarchically into controllers and operator(s). The controllers interact directly with all sensors and actuators within the system. For that reason, hard real-time constrains needs to be complied. The operator however processes the information of the controllers, which can be done by model-based principles using state machines. This paper describes the design of the autonomous mobile DAEbot robot focusing on its architecture with three controllers and two operators as well as the internal communication framework. Furthermore, the simulation capabilities of the system behavior and some safety features are shown.