Unified Behavior Framework in an Embedded Robot Controller

摘要

Recent technological advances produce small, inexpensive, embedded hardware platforms that are powerful enough to match robots from just a few years ago. The Unified Behavior Framework is a flexible, responsive control architecture that has not been applied on embedded systems in robots. This thesis presents a development of the Unified Behavior Framework on the Mini- WHEGSTM, a biologically inspired, embedded robotic platform, which is a small robot that utilize wheel-legs to emulate cockroach walking patterns. Wheel-legs combine wheels and legs for high mobility without the complex control system required for legs. Also included is a color camera and a rotary encoder, enabling the Mini-WHEGSTM to identify color objects and track its position. A hardware abstraction layer designed for the robot in this configuration decouples the control system from the hardware and provides the interface between the software and the hardware. The result is a highly mobile embedded robot system capable of exchanging behavior modules with much larger robots while requiring little or no change to the modules.