SAMURAI Architecture


Our robotic architecture SAMURAI has been under development during the last three years, and it is purposed to operate and control a family of multiple heterogeneous mobile robots (commercial ones and home-made platforms). The robotics architecture of this laboratory is being called SAMURAI that in Spanish stands for Sistema de Arquitecturas de MUltiples Robots Autonomos Integrados.

The SAMURAI architecture homogenizes a diversity of robots' features that have considerable physical and functional differences among the robots. For instance, the mechanical structures, locomotive devices, sensors onboard and software drivers.

Heterogeneous robots mean that the robotic platforms are physically and functionally different. The SAMURAI architecture hides such differences for the human-user. Such differences are homogenized at the level of the kernel system.

All robotic platforms have a special firmware in their onboard computers (minimal systems). A special capability of self-configuration with respect to the software and the hardware onboard is provided by,

This capability involves algorithms to self-detection of the hardware, and reduces the computational differences existing for certain type of robots. Most of such feature parameters are the wheels contact points, number of actuators, the required kinematic control algorithms, hardware available I/O ports, sensors onboard, etc.