Portable Robot Control

Abstract: Abstract The topic of this master thesis is Portable Robot Control and it has been performed jointly with the thesis Portable Robot Programming. The robots mentioned in the title of the Master thesis are industrial robots. Industrial robots are embedded real-time systems. In the embedded real-time systems the computer is part of the system. As all other real-time systems they have to fulfill real-time requirements. Hence, they must be deterministic and predictable.Then, the control and programming tasks of these industrial robots must be performed with tools providing the mechanisms to fulfill the time requirements above-seen. The first task of the thesis is the communication of a robot system using a real-time network protocol. The real-time protocol chosen is ThrottleSim, the Java-based simulation of ThrottleNet. To perform this communications a real-time communications environment is designed. This environment is focused on the intermediate layer that is the link between the chosen network protocol and the application layer. Once the communications in robot systems are implemented, they must be integrated in that system. A robot system consists of many different elements. These parts are the mechanical manipulator (robot) and the robot control system which can consist of the robot server, the computers where the control parameters are generated, the simulator or the network which is used for the communication between all the different parts.The implementation of a Java-based infrastructure to integrate all the parts of the robot system in some experiments is the second main-task of the thesis. Finally, the tasks described above are implemented in the Java programming language, because of its wide range of advantages (platform independence, simplicity, security and robustness). Despite of the fact that Java has a lack of efficiency that makes it not suitable for real-time systems, it is possible to use it as a real-time language through the Java-to-C compilation. This solution provides the advantages of Java as a programming language and solves its main disadvantage.