Systems in Linux/RTAI

Thomas Mörwald, 2007 Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria www.robotik.jku.at

In industry simulation and also visualisation of mechanical and automated systems becomes more and more important. And not only for presentation purposes. A lot of improvements can be achieved by using simulation and visualisation software. Collision detection, automated trajectory planing, fault detection and simulation of not sensored or visible subsystems are just a view examples of how applications can be improved. Also where humans or sensors cannot observe a process it may be important to know about the environment and conditions.

The goal of this project is to extract control data, simulate the behaviour and then represent it as an 3D visualisation. This has to be done online and in realtime on three different systems.

^{Figure 1: Inverse Pendulum Figure 2: Mobile Robot Figure 3: Scara Robot}

The Inverse Pendulum is a simple system controlled by a realtime Linux processing unit (RTAI ) with an MFIO-ISA card for output signals. It has one sensor for measuring the angle at the lower joint and one electrical drive to produce the moment at the ﬂy wheel on the upper joint of the pendulum.
The Mobile Robot is an autonome mobile system with four seperately driven wheels, laser scan head for measuring the distance to obstacles and mapping the environment and a grabber arm on the very top for mechanical interactions. The embedded control interacts with the actors over a CAN bus system. This robot is in work.
The Scara Robot is in work by other students who setup a board game system with a camera, an embedded system for the algorithms (image processing, AI for playing, control, . . . ) and a grabber to pick up gaming pieces. This robot also uses the CAN bus system as control interface.