Study of real time aspects for motion-driven music generation for a quadruped robot

Abstract

Recent advances in legged robotics have expanded their deployment in human-centered environments, where rich multi-modal interaction is essential. While visual and kinematic behaviors are widely studied, real-time auditory feedback directly driven by robot motion remains comparatively underexplored. Such motion-driven sonification requires bounded low-latency synchronization between physical gait events and audio generation; however, standard general-purpose operating systems and middleware such as ROS 2 may introduce non-deterministic scheduling jitter, delayed callbacks, and audible timing artifacts under computational load. This thesis proposes and evaluates an embedded audio-motion synchronization framework for the Unitree Go2 quadruped robot. The system captures high-frequency proprioceptive sensor data at 500 Hz, applies lightweight filtering for gait-event extraction, and maps detected motion features to musical parameters and triggered audio responses in real time. To improve temporal predictability, the software architecture combines a decoupled C++ sensing/audio pipeline with operating-systemlevel real-time scheduling using a PREEMPT_RT patched Linux kernel and SCHED_FIFO thread prioritization. Experimental evaluation under simulated autonomous workloads, including SLAMand navigation-like CPU stress, shows that real-time scheduling primarily improves worst-case timing behavior rather than average computational speed. Under stress, the proposed real-time configuration reduces sensor data loss from 30.16% to 8.30%. It also substantially mitigates long-tail callback execution jitter: while the standard Linux scheduler exhibits a worst-case execution inflation of 1451× with a maximum callback time of 2,875 μs, the real-time configuration bounds the corresponding maximum to 24.7 μs, a 116× reduction. On the deployed Jetson platform, immediate footstep-to-audio events remain below 40 ms, well within the perceptual synchrony target used in this work. These results demonstrate that careful architectural decoupling and real-time scheduling can make motion-synchronous audio feedback practical for embedded interactive robotic systems.