Robot watchdog
AssigneeThe Johns Hopkins University
InventorsDan Stoianovici, Doru Petrisor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Robot watchdog software is responsible for monitoring the state of the system and resulting motion and reformulating commands due to task changes and dynamic conditions. However, if the robot watchdog software slows down or stalls, the motion control board remains unsupervised and robotic motion may become hazardous. The addition of a hardware watchdog mitigates the likelihood of this hazard occurring. A hybrid software-hardware robot watchdog is described herein. A fail-safe robotic system is implemented with a two tier software-hardware check system: the software checks the robotic hardware and in turn a hardware watchdog checks the activity of the software.
Claims20
A system for providing robotic control comprising:
- a hardware watchdog configured to provide control over a robot manipulator;
- and
- a software watchdog configured to run on a processing device and programmed to provide thread-safe architecture control over real-time and non-real-time processes of the hardware watchdog and the robot manipulator.
A hybrid hardware-software watchdog with thread-safe architecture control over real-time and non-real-time processes.
A method for robotic control comprising:
- using a hardware watchdog configured to provide control over a robot manipulator;
- and
- using a software watchdog configured to run on a processing device and programmed to provide thread-safe architecture control over real-time and non-real-time processes of the hardware watchdog and the robot manipulator.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.