Multiple sensor software and hardware architecture for field robots

Applications in Field Robotics often require synchronous acquiring various environment information using multiple sensors and devices, including digital cameras. For such applications, this paper proposes a software architecture that is designed to cope with large amount of mixed type data, acquired with various sample times, and gathered from multiple sensors and sensing devices. By allowing the integration of cameras having widely available communication interfaces, such as USB and Ethernet, the presented architecture is intended to allow a cost-effective and flexible robotic system configuration, providing consistent data and loss-less images to be further used in automated data processing. The paper presents the software design, which was implemented in LabVIEW environment, and an illustrative hardware configuration.