A standardized smart transducer interface

In December 2000, the Object Management Group (OMG) called for a proposal of a smart transducer interface. In response, a new standard has been proposed that comprises a time-triggered transport service within the distributed smart transducer subsystem and a well-defined interface to a CORBA environment. This smart transducer standard has been adopted by the OMG in January 2002. The smart transducer interface and the time-triggered transport service have been implemented in the time-triggered fieldbus protocol TTP/A. This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of the smart transducer interface and presents two case studies. The first case study describes a demonstrator with a robot arm that is instrumented by smart transducers and a TTP/A fieldbus. The second case study is an autonomous mobile robot instrumented by a TTP/A cluster that orientates itself via a set of heterogenous sensors and decides, based on this sensor data, which way to go.