Real-time EtherCAT Master Implementation on Xenomai for a Robot System

Abstract

This paper describes a real-time EtherCAT Master library. The library is developed using Xenomai. Xenomai is a real-time development framework. It cooperates with the Linux kernel, in order to provide a pervasive, interface-agnostic, hard real-time support to user-space applications, seamlessly integrated into the GNU/Linux environment. The proposed master library implements EtherCAT protocol for master side, and supports Application Programming Interfaces(APIs) for programming of real-time application which controls EtherCAT slave.