Raspberry Pi as an Interface for a Hardware Abstraction Layer : Structure of Software and Extension of the Turtlebot 2 – Kobuki Protocol

The use of heterogeneous types of robots in swarms implies the ability to control them uniformly if their characteristics are relatively close. The robots involved in our swarm are indoor differential wheeled robots equipped with 2 to 6 wheels from several manufacturers. All these robots have different hardware components, but they all share the same asynchronous serial communication. To unify the communication for those kinds of robots, we propose to build a low-cost hardware abstraction layer. This project uses a Raspberry Pi on the robot as the primary interface between the serial link of the robots and a computer. In this paper, authors present the software framework, and the protocol required to communicate with this interface, locally or remotely, using a hardware structure defined with the low-cost Raspberry Pi as the heart the system.