Hardware-software compatibility in robotic cyber-physical systems – an application based approach

One of the key technologies of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 are cyber-physical systems (CPS), and the construction of CPSs remains the domain of various fields of engineering -mechanics, control theory or computer science.The communication problem occurring during the implementation of control of single CPS objects may concern the exchange of data within the CPS or between different objects.In this area, problems of software and hardware compatibility appear.This article presents a project of a modular application for the exchange of process data between mechatronic devices, such as robots, which is a solution to this problem.The solution presented in the paper is illustrated on the example of communication between a mobile wheeled robot with Macanum wheels and a quadruped robot.It was assumed that the control of the wheeled robot would be implemented from the perspective of realizing the basic robotics task of driving to the target, while the quadruped robot, constituting a moving target, together with the motion capture system, constituted a CPS whose outputs are incompatible in the softwarehardware sense.By selecting this example, special attention was paid to the importance of multidisciplinarity in the context of the communication problem and also provided an application that allows for a modular solution to the software-hardware compatibility problem.