Special computer architectures for robotics: tutorial and survey

The author provides an overview of recent research into specially designed computer architectures which can provide enhanced computational capabilities to meet the special needs of real-time control of robots and other automation systems. He reviews standard techniques for improving computational power through parallelism and special hardware and then considers how these approaches can be applied to problems in robot control, sensing, and coordination. It is noted that parallel and concurrent computing architectures offer several promising routes for achieving performance improvements, but they must meet the criteria of practical implementability, including connectability, performance, and cost. Some proposed architectures for performance improvements are surveyed, several of which have already achieved some degree of implementation. This survey is intended both to highlight significant progress to date and to provide an overview of the emerging trends for the development of specialized computer architectures in this field of application