Patent ID: 6889118

Claim:
A method in a robot of providing hardware abstraction for robot control software, the method comprising: providing a plurality of resource drivers for the robot, where the plurality of resource drivers includes resource drivers for which no corresponding hardware is present on the robot; detecting a hardware configuration for the robot; automatically detecting resources that are available on the robot based on the detected hardware configuration; receiving a request from the robot control software to use a type of resource; automatically selecting a resource from the available resources that corresponds to the type of resource requested by the robot control software; exchanging a first information with the robot control software, where the first information is related to use of the selected resource and is provided in a unit of measure that is related to a robot; exchanging a second information with a low-level device driver corresponding to the resource, where the second information is related to the use requested by the robot control software, where the second information is provided in a unit of measure that is related to a corresponding device, and where the second information is different than the first information; and converting between the first information and the second information based on the detected configuration of the robot.