Design and implementation of an IPC-based control system for mobile robots

This paper introduces an autonomous mobile robot system applicable under dynamic environment. Every robot contains a multi-sensor system, a differential-drive vehicle and a wireless LAN. A real-time on-board control system makes decision autonomously according to the perception from the multi-sensor system. Under the Windows operation system (OS), inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism of Linux OS is introduced into control system design. A distributed software architecture based on IPC, which can be used for multiple mobile robots system, is proposed. The architecture can make the system more flexible and scalable. The expansion of robot's function and cooperation between robots can be easily realized. The experiments and robot soccer game show the validity of the architecture.