A new generation of robot systems which are modular, flexible and safe for human-robot interaction are needed. Existing cobots seem to meet only the later and require a modular approach to improve their reconfigurability and interoperability. We propose a new sub-class of cobots named M-cobots which tackle these problems. In particular, we discuss the relevance of synchronization for these systems, analyze it and demonstrate how with a properly configured M-cobot, we are able to obtain a) distributed sub-microsecond clock synchronization accuracy among modules, b) timestamping accuracy of ROS 2.0 messages under 100 microseconds and c) millisecond-level end-to-end communication latencies, even when disturbed with networking overloads of up to 90% of the network capacity.
@article{arxiv.1809.07295,
title = {Time Synchronization in modular collaborative robots},
author = {Carlos San Vicente Gutiérrez and Lander Usategui San Juan and Irati Zamalloa Ugarte and Iñigo Muguruza Goenaga and Laura Alzola Kirschgens and Víctor Mayoral Vilches},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.07295},
year = {2018}
}