On the Study of Distributed Control Platform for Robot Using Embedded Ethernet

• Main Authors: Li-Wei Wu, 吳立偉
• Other Authors: Jwu-Sheng Hu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70872445698456920073

博士 === 國立交通大學 === 電機與控制工程系所 === 95 === The system integration effort for intelligent robots has become more and more complex due to the requirement in size, power saving, weight and functionality. PC-based architecture was largely adopted because of its expansion capability and the ease of software development. However, the inherent drawbacks of the PC-based approach such as power consumption also limit the further development of the robot. Several architectures were proposed to offer alternatives of the system integration. For example, OPEN-R bus or CAN bus were discussed and applied to robot systems. By far, the bandwidth of communication and popularity of the bus protocol still prohibit the proposals to be practical in robotics applications. This dissertation proposes a novel distributed embedded control system architecture based on Ethernet, to provide a uniform environment for the integration of real-time control and information exchange. A novel TCP/IP-compatible Hardware Real-Time Protocol (HRTP) is also proposed for real-time capability. This structure focuses on the embedded design of the control network inside a robot. Using embedded Ethernet simplifies the integration of a real-time communications network of an intelligence-type robot system. However, traditional real-time Ethernet technologies have centralized structures, which are large and superfluous for small robot systems. The proposed HRTP, however, is a distributed real-time protocol, which is targeted for embedded real-time Ethernet environments. HRTP provides a low-cost, high-integration and flexible real-time Ethernet environment for small robot systems. This system platform has potential applications in the development of home network based robots. Furthermore, a quadruped robot (O-Di Robot) and a combinational robot system (Explorer Robot) were designed and implemented to demonstrate the proposed framework.