General Purpose Robotics Operating System With Unmanned And Autonomous Vehicle Extensions

What is this patent about?

’877 is related to the field of operating systems, particularly those used in robotics and automation . The patent addresses the need for a general-purpose software platform that can be easily adapted and integrated into various robotics and automation applications. Existing solutions often require significant customization and are not easily scalable or reconfigurable, leading to increased development time and costs.

The underlying idea behind ’877 is to create a modular and configurable operating system that provides a standardized platform for robotics and automation. This is achieved by offering a set of generic software services that can be extended and combined to create custom solutions. The key insight is to decouple the application logic from the underlying hardware and communication infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on the specific requirements of their application.

The claims of ’877 focus on a vehicle with a steering mechanism, brake, and throttle , controlled by an operating system with a set of application services. These services manage obstacle avoidance, synchronous/asynchronous threads, and real-time application threads. The operating system is hardware-independent, configurable, and dynamically adaptable, allowing for software updates over a network and sensor-based control of the vehicle's mechanisms. The vehicle is also configured to fuse data from multiple sensors.

In practice, the invention works by providing a configurable framework where different software modules (services) can be plugged in and connected to each other. For example, a sensor service can be used to read data from a GPS sensor, and a planning service can use this data to generate a navigation plan. The operating system then translates this plan into commands for the steering, brake, and throttle mechanisms. The configuration data, which defines how these services are connected and how they behave, can be updated dynamically, allowing the vehicle to adapt to changing conditions.

’877 differentiates itself from prior approaches by offering a highly flexible and extensible platform . Unlike monolithic robotics architectures, this operating system allows developers to easily integrate new sensors, actuators, and algorithms without modifying the core system. The use of generic abstractions and configurable services also enables the creation of reusable components that can be shared across different applications, reducing development time and costs. The ability to update the software over a network further enhances the adaptability and maintainability of the system.