Towards a Robot Hardware Abstraction Layer (R-Hal) Leveraging the XBot Software Framework

In this paper we present a new Robot Hardware Abstraction Layer (R-HAL) that permits to seamlessly program and control any robotic platform powered by the XBot control software framework. The implementation details of the R-HAL are introduced. The R-HAL is extensively validated through simulation trials and experiments with a wide range of dissimilar robotic platforms, among them the COMAN and WALK-MAN humanoids, the KUKA LWR and the CENTAURO upper body. The results attained demonstrate in practise the gained benefits in terms of code compatibility, reuse and portability, and finally unified application programming even for robots with significantly diverse hardware. Furthermore, it is shown that the implementation and integration of the R-HAL within the XBot framework does not generate additional computational overheads for the robot computational units.