A versatile and open software/hardware architecture for mechatronic systems

In the general field of robotic research, the control systems takes an important place. Since requirements are almost the same for nearly all robots, we propose a versatile architecture easily adaptable for most mechatronic systems. In this paper, we show how we integrate this concept in the self-reconfigurable robot maam that is our contribution. The hardware is based on a processing unit developed around a CPU + FPGA computing system communicating through bluetooth. On this hardware we build a software architecture, were each robot embeds its own description in an XML file. Control interfaces or programming tools are self-reconfigurable, depending of the XML descrition of the robot. That enables quick technology transfer for many mechatronics applications.