Communications Structure for Sensor Fusion in Distributed Real Time Systems

Abstract This paper describes a communication system called SC (Sistema de Comunicaciones) that is suitable for real-time systems with distributed sensory architecture. This system has been implemented in the YAIR robot, an autonomous robot with intelligent sensors that produces different measurements about the environment and its position within it. To guarantee good response times, the sensory modules are connected using the CAN bus. The robot's main controller executes a control algorithm that can be decomposed into smaller parts using a communications server. Thus, the execution can be shared between different processors connected through an Ethernet network.