Integration of hard and soft real-time tasks in Cyber-Physical Systems

At RaM, two interfaces between LUNA, a hard real-time CSP-capable execution framework, and ROS, a distributed robotics middleware, have been developed. This allows developers to offload supervisory algorithms that do not need to satisfy real-time requirements to a more resource rich platform, while loop controllers and hardware interfacing are executed on embedded hardware. Even though this interface to ROS exist, it is not often used in the development of robot software.

The goal of this project is to provide users with a way to combine hard real-time control with soft real-time algorithms. For this it is necessary to know what the performance and limitations of the interfaces mentioned above are. An analysis on the integration of the ROS-LUNA interfaces will be done by developing a demonstration setup containing multiple devices, a hard real-time control loop and soft real-time supervisory control algorithms. On this setup, functional tests will be performed to assess the technical performance of the interfaces. Improvements on the interfaces that follow from these tests can be made to improve the usability of the interfaces.