CTC++ for the Arty Robot

The assignment given for this project was to write CTC++ channels for Arty. The CT in CTC++ stands for Communicating Threads. It is a programming construction based on the CSP language developed by Hoare in 1978[1]. This has been ported by Gerald Hilderink to a Java[2], a C and C++ library. The C++ library is called CTC++ and is being used at the Control Engineering group of the University of Twente. Arty is a mobile robot that was built in 1999 by a group of second year students. At that time CTC++ was being developed, but was not yet usable. Therefore Arty was programmed in a framework called 20-works that is used at the Control Engineering. The higher control loop was agent based[3,4]. To be able to program Arty using CTC++, a CTC++ program should be able to interface to the sensors and actuators of Arty. For this purpose, channels were developed that can read from and write to the sensors and actuators of Arty. The channels that were written are discussed in chapter 2. Besides the writing of the channels, a program was written that can demonstrate the use of the channels that were written. This program is discussed in chapter 4. To be able to determine the parameters of the PI controllers in this program, a 20-sim model of Arty was made. Chapter 3 elaborates on this.