Industrial Automation: Real-Time Frequency Control (RTOS)
Academic Project: Robotics & Digital Design
🎯 Project Overview
Designed a multi-tasking control system for an autonomous robot using an RTOS architecture. Built a responsive interface enabling real-time actuator/LED frequency adjustment via touch sensors, ensuring zero-latency input handling.
🛠️ Technical Implementation
Implemented an event-driven architecture, replacing a super-loop with 5 concurrent tasks:
Task 1 & 2 (Interrupt Handling): Touch sensor monitoring with software debouncing for signal integrity.
Task 3 (Global Logic Controller): Dynamic frequency updates from asynchronous events.
Task 4 (Actuator Task): Hardware port toggling at the set frequency.
Task 5 (Timer Task): RTOS heartbeat and task scheduling.
💻 Key Engineering Concepts
Concurrency & Synchronization: Protected global variables from race conditions using taskENTER_CRITICAL() / taskEXIT_CRITICAL().
Resource Management: Applied the StartScheduler() pattern for CPU time allocation across tasks.
I/O Logic: Implemented bounded frequency control (100ms–2000ms) with increment/decrement logic and crash protection.
Implemented as a part of the Introduction to Robotics Curriculum