New robot control system with open architecture

The closed architecture of conventional robot control systems is an obstacle to many robot applications, especially to the research projects in which the control schemes or the system parameters used by robot controllers need to be modified. For such cases, the architecture of the robot control system is obviously required to be open and interactive with users. This paper presents a new robot control system with open architecture and an interactive user interface developed at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. First, we present the architecture for our system hardware and software followed with simple explanations of each module. Then, we focus our attention on the system software and make a detail explanation of a crucial module_the communication module of the system. Finally, we give a real world example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system