The Real-time Control Framework for a Modular Snake Robot

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is widely adopted for the control of the robots which is usually running on the Linux system with a standard kernel. But snake robot has a high requirement for the real-time of the control framework since it has several modules which contain a variety of sensors. To solve the problem, the control frame based on the Xenomai real-time system is developed by inserting a patch to the kernel and the real-time performance can be further enhanced by priority scheduling. The proposed control framework of the snake robot is applied to deal with the non- real-time communication thread with ROS packages and the real-time communication thread with the joint controller. So the application programs based on the proposed control framework can realize the multi-task function and be compatible with the ROS system. At last, the experiments validate that the control framework can control the hardware of the snake robot efficiently.