The educational robot (RELbot) is designed to provide students of the MSc Robotics with an interactive tool to learn with during their studies. The RELbot currently houses a Raspberry Pi plus icoBoard FPGA controller. The Raspberry Pi has a complicated dual-core architecture, utilizing the firm real-time Xenomai framework alongside the soft-realtime ROS2 Linux kernel.
The overall goal is to create an alternative, simplified controller architecture by eliminating the Xenomai framework and running the firm real-time and hard real-time tasks directly on the icoBoard FPGA (and/)or microcontroller(s) (e.g., Pico 2). The FPGA or microcontroller would then act as a ROS2 node. Ideally, 20-sim is used to generate code for the firm and hard real-time tasks. The performance of the resulting system is then compared to that of the original ROS2+Xenomai framework.
Various variants and extensions of this assignment are possible:
- Command&control environment (e.g., via wireless interface, ideally 5 GHz band)
- Controlling a swarm of RELbots in a distributed network
- Extensions of the Scout project
- Sophisticated safety layers so that RELbots do not drive off a deadly cliff (i.e., table edge)
- Additional interfacing modalities or useful additions with a sufficiently strong scientific research component