Autonomous Real Time Architecture for High Performance Mobile Robots

Highly-dynamic robotic systems, such as hopping robots, require light, computationally and energy efficient on-board units for control. This paper presents such a computational unit together with a software architecture for achieving high-performance behaviors, such as balancing and hopping. These demanding behaviors require accurate dynamic calculations, high-bandwidth control, and fast real-time state estimation. The proposed system consists of cheap and off-the-shelf electronics that are detailed in this paper. The effectiveness of the presented approach is validated on a balancing machine called Tippy, which is able to achieve fast tracking of command signals while balancing. The experimental results of this paper demonstrate that reliable real-time software for demanding high-performance robotic applications, which require fast control loops and intensive calculations, can be achieved with light, low cost and energy efficient components, which can empower the widespread use and experimentation of high-performance robots worldwide.