A parallel distributed processing robotic system

This paper describes a real-time robotic system. It runs on a heterogeneous multiprocessor system and the system communicates with the robot via RS232 link or infrared link. The multiprocessing system is a IBM personal computer and a i860 add-on card. There are several tasks required for a high performance real-time robotics system: (1) An efficient decision-making task to fulfil the real-time requirement such as supervision, coordination and local control of the robot (2) A real-time graphics task to display the robot´s location and its environment (3) A real-time alerting task to alert the system software to perform efficient recovery when the robot is not in its controlling environment (4) Other nonreal-time tasks such as auditing and scheduling (5) Tasks for communication between the robot and the host. In this paper, a multiprocessing distributed system is designed such that the tasks 1 to 4 is handled on the IBM, and the graphics display system is handled by the i860 because of its extremely good graphics performance. The software and hardware design for the system to have a good real-time performance is also discussed