Design and Implementation of an Android Application for Real-time Motion Control

This paper addresses the design and implementation of an Android application for real-time precise motion control. To provide stable real-time performance, we implemented the application in two parts: Android service in the form of a daemon process, which periodically transfers a set of position commands for all motors through a real-time fieldbus, and Android UI application, which generates and delivers the set of position commands to the Android service. To support such a real-time motion control application, we use multi-core partitioning, which partitions the processor cores into a real-time partition to be used by the real-time motion control service and a non-real-time partition to be used by the Android application, and set up a shared buffer between them for communication. Our experiments show that we can obtain a motion control period of 2 ms with 99% task activation jitters less than for a configuration where each of the four threads controls two motors in a group.