Redesign of the real time software platform for the Mechweed robot

Abstract: This Degree project work describes the work and considerations done whenporting the real time platform for the Mechweed robot from QNX to Windows2000. A big part of this project is about the work and considerations neededto be thought of when programming a real time platform that should be usedand maintained by scientists that are not primary programmers. Because of theold platform not being well suited for the current working scientists, thisproject work grew beyond a simple porting, to instead rewriting almost all ofthe platform. This work sets a ground for future development of the real timeplatform as well as enables for the possibility of making interfaces betweenthe real time platform and for example Matlab or Labview, which both areavailable for the Windows 2000 operating system. These would be greatfeatures for the scientists working on this project, since they could easily,while running the robot or directly after a test run, see Matlab graphs anddo calculations on the collected data. The tools that were used for portingwas the support from the Windows API and a library called Universal Library.The program code was written mainly in C++ and C, using Microsoft Visual C++6. The porting was successful and code was cut down to less then half of theoriginal size, and thus hopefully easier to work with.