Development of Robot Controllers Based on PC Hardware and Open Source Software

Overview

Researchers, developers and system integrators require more openness in control systems in order to design, develop and rapidly integrate functionalities to fulfill new application requirements. Even if several robot control vendors provide their products with customized development tools, low cost and not proprietary solutions should be preferred to face the rapid market changes and to reduce control life cycle costs. In fact, most important success factors are the use of off-the-shelf hardware and open source and/or free software, as well as a design focused on reconfigurability and portability of the control software is crucial. In this paper a control architecture which complies with the above mentioned requirements is presented.