A NEW DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE WITHIN THE PYRO ENVIRONMENT FOR A QUADRUPED ROBOT

The robot platfonns are usually composed with a bunch of different elements coming from different technologies, therefore merging and handling information, from sensors to actuators, is a complex problem. Our aim is obtain a controller of a legged robot walking on unstructured environments and to develop robust algorithms to coordinate the movement according to a variety of requirements. We built a small 4-legged autonomous robot, named Warugadar, endowed with monocular camera, piezoelectric contact sensors and ZigBee transceivers, thought to be modular and scalable. In fact it is possible to change hardware components without deeply modifying its software architecture. Each component of the robot ( data acquisition board for sensors, camera, motor board) is stand-alone and shares information and receives commands from a brain unit on a remote computer powered by Pyro ( Python Robotics). Pyro is an open-source robotics toolkit written in Python for exploring topics in AI and Robotics, which introduces generic robot abstractions that are uniform across a number of robot platform regardless of their size and morphology. In this way it is possible to control the behaviors of Warugadar.