New fault tolerant robotic central controller for space robot system based on ARM processor

A new fault tolerant robotic central controller with dual processing modules is introduced. Each processing module is composed of 32 bit ARM RISC processor and other commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. As well as, a set of fault handling mechanisms is implemented in the robotic central controller, which can tolerate a single fault. The robotic central controller software based on VxWorks is organized around a set of processes that communicate between each other through a routing process. Considering the demanding of the extremely tight constraints on mass, volume, power consumption and space environmental conditions, the new fault tolerant robotic central controller has been developed. Its excellent data processing capability is enough to meet the space robot missions.