Standardized distributed robotics

mlw · 2006-03-13T16:46:59+00:00

As I am working on my robot, I had sort of a flash last night.I wrote a network enabled joystick program that could use a joystickconnected to one machine to control a robot over a wireless (or wired)network.Before it is really clear what I'm thinking, let me explain the robot systemI have so far, it is a pseudo real-time cooperative multitasking systemthat should be portable, but it is currently running under Linux.It has one main high priority loop that uses task structures to call into"handler" routines. After all the work is done that needs to be done periteration, it calculates how long it should sleep, then loops again. Itworks pretty well, and is similar to stuff I did long ago in my embeddeddays.There are basically two classes that are important, tasks and eventhandlers. Tasks get called periodically. Event handlers get called bytasks. Event handlers may be shared amongst multiple tasks.The robot program uses multiple tasks, with one event handler. The mainevent handler handles key strokes, error conditions, etc.Using this structure, I simply created a network listening task that waitedfor a fixed length packet from the network joystick program, from which itcreated a "event" and passed it along to the main event handler.Last night, I started thinking, I was stupid, I should have made the networktask far more generic and written it so it could accept more than oneconnection, have bi-directional communication, as well as handle any sortof event.So I am embarking on doing this, as I think about it, if I publish the eventspecification structure and format. Try to make a fairly standard APIlibrary, it should be possible to fully distribute the functionality of therobot over multiple computers fairly easily. This should be lighter weightthan something like MPI or PVM, and be able to have built in errorprotection needed for robotics.Any thoughts? Anyone have any suggestions on what the API should look like?

Mar 13, 2006 22 Replies

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Rich Walker 20 years ago

Yep. And I still think you're wrong :->

cheers, Rich.

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mlw 20 years ago

Actually, don't you think there are slightly more options than simply "right" and "wrong?" There are multiple options that do not clearly qualify as "wrong." Just as there are multiple options that do not clearly qualify as "right."

Obviously, I don't think I am wrong, but I can see how some people wouldn't choose the approach I am taking.

I looked at player/stage and I like the amount of support it has, but I just saw too much abstraction and not enough modularity.

Much of the design work that I need to do is the sort of stuff I do professionally, so it isn't a huge leap for me.

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Rich Walker 20 years ago

Oh yes, but that spoils a good argument.

Have you looked at TIPC:

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which is now in the linux kernels, and so *might* be useful for providing distributed robot data structures...

cheers, Rich.

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