Losada Diego P, Fernández Joaquín L, Paz Enrique, Sanz Rafael
Robotics and Control Unit, AIMEN Technology Centre, Porriño 36410, Spain.
Department of System Engineering and Automation, University of Vigo, Vigo 36310, Spain.
Sensors (Basel). 2017 May 3;17(5):1013. doi: 10.3390/s17051013.
In this article, we present a CAN-based (Controller Area Network) distributed system to integrate sensors, actuators and hardware controllers in a mobile robot platform. With this work, we provide a robust, simple, flexible and open system to make hardware elements or subsystems communicate, that can be applied to different robots or mobile platforms. Hardware modules can be connected to or disconnected from the CAN bus while the system is working. It has been tested in our mobile robot Rato, based on a RWI (Real World Interface) mobile platform, to replace the old sensor and motor controllers. It has also been used in the design of two new robots: BellBot and WatchBot. Currently, our hardware integration architecture supports different sensors, actuators and control subsystems, such as motor controllers and inertial measurement units. The integration architecture was tested and compared with other solutions through a performance analysis of relevant parameters such as transmission efficiency and bandwidth usage. The results conclude that the proposed solution implements a lightweight communication protocol for mobile robot applications that avoids transmission delays and overhead.
在本文中，我们提出了一种基于控制器局域网（CAN）的分布式系统，用于在移动机器人平台中集成传感器、执行器和硬件控制器。通过这项工作，我们提供了一个强大、简单、灵活且开放的系统，以使硬件元件或子系统能够通信，该系统可应用于不同的机器人或移动平台。在系统运行时，硬件模块可以连接到CAN总线或从CAN总线上断开。它已在我们基于RWI（现实世界接口）移动平台的移动机器人Rato中进行了测试，以取代旧的传感器和电机控制器。它还被用于设计两款新机器人：BellBot和WatchBot。目前，我们的硬件集成架构支持不同的传感器、执行器和控制子系统，如电机控制器和惯性测量单元。通过对传输效率和带宽使用等相关参数进行性能分析，对该集成架构进行了测试并与其他解决方案进行了比较。结果表明，所提出的解决方案为移动机器人应用实现了一种轻量级通信协议，避免了传输延迟和开销。
