OSCAR. An open software concept for autonomous robots

Programming robotic applications is hardly standardized. A major reason for this is the very special hardware equipment applied to the robot and the aim the software is written for. As a result, a modular approach including easy maintenance and reusability of the modules is difficult to realize with the systems currently available on the market. OSCAR therefore has been designed as a general purpose concept to create modular robotic software written in C++. It declares four software layers, each boundary representing a well defined step of abstraction from hardware related to high level related data and services. Data and services are handled by OSCAR´s task management without any knowledge of their specific contents. OSCAR is designed to run even sophisticated applications in a “cheap” environment (PCs+Windows 3.11 or microcontrollers). The lack of real-time support and efficient multitasking mechanisms in DOS made us implement it in OSCAR; currently a priority driven multitasking management with soft and hard real-time capabilities, event handling and distributed execution on several machines is provided. OSCAR is running on two mobile platforms with different hardware structures and kinematics to prove its functionality