Artificial Intelligence for Robotics

Reading serial ports in a real-time manner

One of our functions for the robot control program is to communicate with the Arduino microcontroller over a serial port. How do we do that and maintain our timing loop we have worked so hard for? Let's put down another very important rule about controlling robots that will be illustrated in the next bit of code. Let's make this a tip:

In real-time systems (hard or soft) never use blocking calls . Always poll to get your data.

Let's have a quick review. A blocking call suspends execution of our program to wait for some event to happen. In this case, we would be waiting for the serial port to receive data ending in a new line character. If the system on the other end of the serial port never sends ...