A Method to Support Real-time for User-level Robot Components on Windows

Abstract

Intelligent service robots leading the future market are robots which assist humans physically, mentally, and emotionally. Since intelligent service robots operate in a tightly coupled manner with humans, their safe operation should be an inevitable consideration. For this safety, real-time capabilities are necessary to execute certain services periodically. Currently, most robot components are being developed based on Windows for the sake of development convenience. However, since Windows does not support real-time, there is no option but to use expensive third-party software such as RTX and INTime. Also since most robot components are usually execute in user-level, we need to research how to support real-time in user-level. In this paper, we design and implement how to support real-time for components running in user-level on Windows using RTiK which actually supports real-time in kernel level on Windows.