A real-time communication protocol for interconnecting robotic smart devices

A communication system for robotics application should allow fast exchange of real-time data for low level robot control and large amount of data for high level algorithms like intelligent vision or map building. Ethernet seems to be the perfect candidate for the low level communication interface because of its large diffusion, high bandwidth and low cost. This paper describes a real-time communication protocol for interconnecting robotic smart devices. Some comparison with existing standard are also presented.