RTRobMultiAxisControl: A Framework for Real-Time Multiaxis and Multirobot Control

This paper presents the challenges met in the development of a new framework for multiaxis and multirobot control. The increasing demand for multirobot collaboration and robotic assistance, both in industry and service applications, has raised the level of interactions between robots and humans in a shared environment with real-time constraints. Some scientific and technological issues need to be unlocked to ensure safe human-robot interactions: to guarantee the response time during the robot perception-action process, to cope with dynamic interactions with the robot environment, to secure the collaborations between several machines and humans, and to improve the integration of the robots at home and in open zones of production lines. The specifications of a new hardware and software framework are set with respect to these observations. The framework will meet complex research and industrial issues for the future of multiaxis and multirobot control. Before introducing our approach, a brief survey of existing frameworks and robotic middleware is given. The foundations of our approach are based on the following requirements: the framework must be real time, transferable, maintainable, and multimanufacturer. The framework design has also to guarantee the robustness of the machine interactions in a dynamic and collaborative environment. To evaluate the feasibility of our design strategy and assess its performance, we have developed mechatronic devices with a high level of human-machine collaboration. This paper outlines two robotic applications which require multirobot real-time synchronization and are based on the proposed framework. A temporal analysis demonstrates its robustness for multiaxis and multirobot control.