Talk:Low-cost Robotics

Goals

• September 2010

Written state-of-the art in the area, including a reasoned and commented collection of relevant sites

• September 2010

Selection of an appropriate tool to support plug-and-play interaction among HW/SW modules, on widely used standards (e.g., CAN bus). A candidate is CAN Festival. Test of the tool on ST-based boards (and Microchip as well)

Notes

Communication Middleware

• Requirements

- Low hardware requirements to run on 8-bit microcontrollers
- Some way to sync all processes (distributed clock)
- Lowest possible latency for real time control
- Possibility to run on different hardware links (low cost as CAN, high bandwidth as Ethernet, wireless like Zigbee)

• Candidates (hardware link)

- CAN
- Ethernet
- 802.15.4 - >Zigbee

• Candidates (communication protocol)

- CANopen - TTP/A - UDP - (Ethercat)

• Candidates (communication framework)

- http://www.canfestiva.org -

• Candidates (middleware)

• Candidates (distributed objects)

- http://arco.esi.uclm.es/en/node/18

Proposal

• CAN+Ethernet+ZigBee
• LCM for marshaling and communication (publish/subscribe)

- Some system to pass messages to local processes
- Some kind of distributed clock on LCM

• Minimalist VM for scripting purposes