Evrensel robot veriyolu: Küçük robotlar için yerel haberleşme altyapısı

Design and construction of small autonomous mobile robots is a challenging taskthat involves the selection, interfacing and programming of a large number ofsensor and actuator components. Facilitating this tedious process requires modularityand extensibility in both hardware and software components. This thesisconcerns the development of a real-time infrastructural architecture called theUniversal Robot Bus (URB), based on the popular Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C)bus standard. The main purpose of the URB is the rapid development and realtimeinterfacing of local nodes controlling small sensor and actuator componentsdistributed on a mobile robot platform. It is designed to be very lightweightand efficient, with real-time support for RS232 or USB connections to a centralcomputer.The URB infrastructure is inspired from the RiSEBus architecture, which isalso an internal communication protocol for mobile robots, and developed to fitour requirements. URB offers a modular and extensible architecture for rapidand frequent changes to the platform design. Mobile robots also need to performaccurate sensory processing and estimation in order to operate in unstructuredenvironments. Hence, the URB also supports real-time operations with reliablehardware and software components.The first novel contribution of this thesis is the design and implementationof automatic synchronization of data acquisition across multiple nodes. Our synchronizationalgorithm ensures that each node completes data acquisition taskssimultaneously well before read operations. Our experiments also prove thateach individual node acquires data at approximately the same time instant. Thesecond major contribution of this thesis is the incorporation of automated and unsupervised data acquisition across multiple nodes into the URB protocol. Autonomousdata acquisition helps acquire periodic and frequently needed dataover nodes. This enhancement reduces the computational load on the centralprocessing unit and reduces bandwidth costs over the communication medium.This thesis also servers a survey on network architectures and protocols, networkapplications in robotics, synchronization algorithms, and applications of synchronizationin robotics besides implementation details of the URB.