A Hardware Interface for Joint Control in the AD Architecture

Abstract

The robot Maggie is a personal robot designed as a research platform in the fields of social robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The control system of the robot is the AD (Automatic-Deliberative) architecture. AD is a modular distributed robot control architecture which it has been developed in the RoboticsLab. The architecture is specifically designed to operate the robot Maggie. This allows AD to fit the necessities of the robot in a robust and efficient manner. However, while the robot capacities have been increasing, the architecture showed little flexibility in presence of hardware changes. As a consequence, it is difficult to adapt the software controllers of new hardware components to make them AD-compatible. This is the case, especially, in the field of the actuators and their controllers. Therefore it is necessary to make the architecture extensible and capable of supporting new hardware devices. This thesis presents a complete redesign of the lower levels of the architecture which improves the flexibility of AD allowing it to control new hardware devices. The thesis shows both a theoretic and a technical view of the new designed layers, offering a starting point to the developers which are interested in adapting their software controllers to the AD architecture.