Development of a cyber-physical system for mobile robot control using Erlang

Abstract

Design of mobile robot control systems is a huge challenge, which require solving issues related to concurrent hardware access and providing high availability. Existing solutions in the domain are based on technologies using low level languages and shared memory concurrency model, which seems unsuitable for the task. In this paper a different approach to the problem of building a cyber-physical system for mobile robots control is presented. It is based on Erlang language and technology, which support lightweight processes, fault tolerance mechanisms and uses message passing concurrency model with built-in inter-process communication. Created system used a new, open-source robotic platform, which had been designed for scientific and educational purposes. Integrated system has been tested in several scenarios, proving flexibility, durability and high performance.