Authors:
Andrés Faíña
;
Francisco Bellas
and
Richard J. Duro
Affiliation:
Integrated Group for Engineering Research, University of Coruña, Spain
Keyword(s):
Middleware software tool, control system abstraction, autonomous robotics.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Warehouses
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Robot Design, Development and Control
;
Robotics and Automation
Abstract:
In this work we present the initial implementation of a middleware software tool called the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HABLA). This tool isolates the control architecture of an autonomous computational system, like a robot, from its particular hardware implementation. It is provided with a set of general sensors and typical sensorial processing mechanisms of this kind of autonomous systems allowing for its application to different commercial platforms. This way, the HABLA permits the control designer to focus its work on higher-level tasks minimizing the time spent on the adaptation of the control architecture to different hardware configurations. Another important feature of the HABLA is that both hardware-HABLA and HABLA-control communications take place through standard TCP sockets, permitting the distribution of the computational cost over different computers. In addition, it has been developed in JAVA, so it is platform independent. After presenting the general HABLA diagram an
d operation structure, we consider a real application using the same deliberative control architecture on two different autonomous robots: an Aibo legged robot and a Pioneer 2Dx wheeled robot.
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