Nov 29 2013
A recently completed Industrial Ph.D. project done in cooperation between Prevas (STO:PREVB) and DTU, the Technical University of Denmark, enables advanced robot technology to run on embedded systems.
For the last three years the research project has worked on improving the potential for creating commercial products based on advanced robot technology and thereby enables Prevas and DTU to help partners with turning research ideas into real life products.
A recent trend in the academic communities all over the world is to cooperate by using a common software framework named ROS, Robot Operating System. ROS contains a large amount of advanced functionality for controlling robots autonomously, e.g. vision algorithms, robot arm control and navigation of mobile robots.
“Unfortunately ROS has primarily been designed for research where robustness and performance is less important. We have developed a ROS compatible middleware named DARC. DARC fulfills much better the industrial requirements that Prevas and many other companies have and with this framework existing ROS functionality can be executed much more efficiently on embedded systems. Furthermore DARC makes it easier to utilize embedded technologies like DSPs, FPGAs etc. for accelerating calculations and algorithms”, says Morten Kjaergaard from Prevas.
Morten Kjaergaard has recently defended his Ph.D. at DTU where he presented his improvements to ROS and how they will help the industry to use more advanced robot technology. After this the work continues at Prevas where the results of the project will be used to offer customers services and products based on ROS, DARC and embedded robot technology.
Source: http://www.prevas.com/