ppPDC Communication Framework - A New Tool for Distributed Robotics

Parallel processing Producer-Distributor-Consumer (ppPDC) transmission scenario is proposed and developed for improving communication features of the Ethernet-based switched industrial networks. First version of ppPDC-based communication infrastructure was developed in the LabVIEW graphical programming platform as a flexible and low cost framework. Further development of the framework turned it into a fully functional real-time middleware, which has the main advantage of running the message processing in the protocol stacks in parallel, thus minimising the impact of nodes processing times on network efficiency. The proposed ppPDC-based communication infrastructure, amongst many other possible uses such as intelligent multiagent systems, can be well-suited in distributed robotics.