Robot Communication Part One
Wireless communication is number one in my list of embedded system control techniques. Next is audio, including speech recognition and text to audio: both will become more popular in the immediate future. Right now I am working towards two way communication via wifi. The first step is to configure wifi then make a connection via sockets. Later multi-threading and channels will need examination.
There are many choices to be made regarding the flow of the communication. One must design a lanugage that quickly passes commands in one direction and data in the other. Ideally you might like to have a visual channel, but this is the last item on my list. I am assuming that the controller may not always be able to see the robot (through distance or insufficient light), hence as many sensors as possible will be employed, producing a high volume of data flowing from the robot to the controller. The controller will use a user interface to initiate commands, which will create an opposing flow of data that should be given priority.
For beginners like myself, the first questions to resolve are “How do sockets work?” “How successful will this connection be?” " Do I need more than one channel?" “Will data arrive in one piece?” I believe the way we can find out is to write the code, run it, then examine the results.
I believe we will need a system of codes to pass information. I also believe we will need multi-threading to efficiently share resources. However Part One of the programming code will only begin to address these issues. For now we are only looking at sockets and two way data flow.