A Hierachical Operating System of a Chewing Robot for Interactive Real-time Control

Mastication plays a critical role in the food digestive process. A chewing robot was developed to simulate the food masticatory process to evaluate food properties. The operating system of the robot is introduced in this paper. The system is divided into three layers, one operating on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), one running on a micro-controller and the interactive layer operating on a PC. The FPGA layer senses and actuates the basic components of the robot. The controller layer performs robot motion planning and control. The interactive layer gathers information displaying to the user of the robot and allow the user to send command to the robot.