Distributed Control on a model of Mars Rover Spirit

The achievement in VLSI technology has changed the old style single CPU integration into new concept of Distributed Control on multiple controllers which emphasis on the data communication between controllers. The main CPU sends command(s) and retrieves data/status from the slave controller(s) and the slave controller(s) act accordingly, as the result, two major impacts had occurred, the hardware design is much simpler, it can be designed into a much simpler basic unit and it can be duplicated throughout the system for any equivalent job. Even though the jobs, may vary based on various functionalities, only minor additional hardware had been added to cover all the extra features. The major improvement is in the software development cycle, it has been cut drastically from months/year to just only week(s). This paper is a good example of an effort to implement the Distributed Control concept into a model of scaled-down Mars Rover Spirit which in turn simplifies the overall design (both hardware and software) and allows the designer to easily add more software features such as: machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. to the robot in the future.