CONDOR: A Coarse-grained Parallel Architecture for Robot Control

This paper presents an overview of the CONDOR, a real-time development environment designed for robotics research applications. The architecture is based on standard hardware components consisting of upto eight microprocessors interconnected through a shared memory bus, and is coupled with a powerful software environment based on message passing that enables the development of control programs for complicated robots. The hardware is extremely easy to set up since it uses standard components. Besides program libraries tuned for real-time control, the software utilities include a multi-processor pseudo-terminal emulator, a file-server and a flexible symbolic debugger that greatly enhance programmer productivity.