A Concept of Dynamically Reconfigurable Real-time Vision System for Autonomous Mobile Robotics

This paper describes specific constraints of vision systems that are dedicated to be embedded in mobile robots.If PC- based hardware architecture is convenient in this field because of its versatility,flexibility,performance,and cost,current real-time operating systems are not completely adapted to long processing with varying duration,and it is often necessary to oversize the system to guarantee fall-safe functioning.Also,interactions with other robotic tasks having more priority are difficult to handle.To answer this problem,we have developed a dynamically reconfigurable vision processing system,based on the innovative features of Clopatre real-time applicative layer concerning scheduling and fault tolerance.This framework allows to define emergency and optional tasks to ensure a minimal quality of service for the other subsystems of the robot,while allowing to adapt dynamically vision processing chain to an exceptional overlasting vision process or processor overload.Thus,it allows a better cohabitation of several subsystems in a single hardware,and to develop less expensive but safe systems,as they will be designed for the regular case and not rare exceptional ones.Finally,it brings a new way to think and develop vision systems,with pairs of complementary operators.