Robust Communications for High Bandwidth Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Robotic systems today have such high computational requirements that it is neces-sary to distribute the workload across many processes and processors. Because of this distribution, a means for transferring data between these processes is required. Many low level protocols exist today for handling this communication task, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. This thesis work strives to create a higher level communication protocol built on top of these lower level protocols, geared specifically toward meeting the system requirements of real-time robotic systems. This thesis work attempts to encapsulate all the beneficial features from each of the underlying protocols, providing a programmer with an efficient toolkit for intercon-necting a system of processes. This new high level protocol provides several advantages over other protocols. These advantages include extremely high band-widths in real-time environments, low memory overhead, stability, data transmis-sion reliability, diagnostic capabilities, and ease of use. Other communication protocols exists, but none currently provide all of these features. This thesis work presents new philosophies on how data should be transferred between processes. Moreover, this work not only presents a new communication paradigm, but it also provides a real-world solution to real-time interprocess com-munications. This protocol, termed Real-Time Communications (RTC), has been rigorously tested in several real-world robotic applications.