Concepts of a Modular System Architecture for Distributed Robotic Systems

Modern robots often use more than one processing unit to solve the requirements in robotics. Robots are frequently designed in a modular manner to fulfill the possibility to be extended for future tasks. The use of multiple processing units leads to a distributed system within one single robot. Therefore, the system architecture is even more important than in single-computer robots. The presented concept of a modular and distributed system architecture was designed for robotic systems. The architecture is based on the Operator&ndash
Controller Module (OCM). This article describes the adaption of the distributed OCM for mobile robots considering the requirements on such robots, including, for example, real-time and safety constraints. The presented architecture splits the system hierarchically into a three-layer structure of controllers and operators. The controllers interact directly with all sensors and actuators within the system. For that reason, hard real-time constraints need to comply. The reflective operator, however, processes the information of the controllers, which can be done by model-based principles using state machines. The cognitive operator is used to optimize the system. The article also shows the exemplary design of the DAEbot, a self-developed robot, and discusses the experience of applying these concepts on this robot.