EEROS is the right candidate for educational purposes for the following reasons:
- Flexibility: EEROS allows students to implement and use varying control structures, all while ensuring safety.
- Pre-defined structure: The unique architecture provides a solid base for building custom robotics software. The modularity of EEROS allows creation and use of libraries with universal components that can be used in different contexts and applications.
- Software consistency: Blocks in EEROS are provided with information about signals flowing through them, which guarantees consistency in the development of control systems.
- Real-time capability: Allows students to work with real-time programming, helping them understand important issues that have to be considered, such as system architectures, race conditions, timing, and communication.
- Open source: Students can use or modify EEROS on their own computers without the need for expensive licensing.
- Object-oriented programming: Students can learn to program in C++, a widely used programming language in industry.
- Built-in robotics blocks: Students will use pre-defined blocks (kinematic, dynamic, etc.), allowing them to familiarize themselves with robotics topics and related programming issues.
To allow people to test their EEROS software on a real hardware platform, a family of low-cost, open source hardware, EEDURO, was developed. It is possible to both buy the hardware or download CAD data to build it yourself.
EEROS is designed to be robust and flexible enough to be applicable in all fields of robotics. To keep up with the rapid expansion of the robotics industry, EEROS emphasizes fast software development without sacrificing safety and reliability.
Specifically, EEROS's industry-related strengths are:
- Real-time capability: EEROS can be configured as a hard real-time system.
- Safety: The unique structure of the safety system intrinsically gives the program safety. The system allows for several safety levels to be defined, each of which can be configured read specific safety inputs and set outputs appropriately.
- Flexibility: EEROS allows implementing varied control strategies, all while ensuring safety.
- Open source: EEROS is open source, meaning it can be freely downloaded with no licensing costs. Additionally, it means that it can be modified to fit different needs.
- Advanced control: Advanced and proven control algorithms are built into EEROS, strengthening the control capabilities of a new robot to the latest state of the art.
Some industrial robots have already been developed with EEROS, showing its efficacy in an industrial context.