Towards an open-source integrated development and real-time control platform for robots

The paper proposes an open-source platform for developing kinematic and dynamic models, simulation and control design of robots, based on MaTX. We show that the developed programs can be easily transferred for direct execution in real-time, making use of improvements in the recent Linux kernel toward hard real-time capability. We show that, in combination with the real-time preemption patch of Ingo Molnar, there is the potential for real-time control of a robot arm. This is confirmed through experiments for real-time control of a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries seven-DOF PA-10 robot.