Real-time controller loops have always been a key component of robot development. However, the design and programming of this real-time part are demanding for control engineers.
To simplify the real-time part for all developers, a standardized implementation on a widely available piece of hardware would make an enormous difference. Not merely for development purposes, but also for educational function.
Currently, open-source software is a big part of software development. The advantage herein lies in that developers can add freely to these projects and therefore they are lesser prone to bugs and have a higher general quality. Because multiple users can contribute to the project. ROS2 is one of those open-source projects which is used in robot software development.
The goal of this research is to propose a general architecture that aligns with the non-real-time capabilities of ROS2 and which is easy to implement on open-source embedded hardware. Reusability and integration are an important part of this architecture.
The first part of this project will be to differentiate between the different options for hardware, operating system, and communication protocol etc. Which will then result in an optimal configuration. The final step will be to implement this architecture and test it using various real-time testing tools and on a small robot setup using model-driven designed controller code.