A scheduling approach for decentralized mobile robot control system

Most existing studies dealing with the scheduling of real-time control systems had neglected time variation in the perception, decision and actions loops of the controlled system, especially when this system is distributed over a broadcast network. In this paper, a distributed mobile robot architecture which takes into account the previous problem is proposed. To this end, a scheduling algorithm which allows one to determine accurately the message interarrival time at each node is developed. An application on a multiplexed field bus, named the controller area network (CAN), is also discussed.