High-performance operating system primitives for robotics and real-time control systems

Abstract

To increase speed and reliability of operation, multiple computers are replacing uniprocessors and wired-logic controllers in modern robots and industrial control systems. However, performance increases are not attained by such hardware alone. The operating software controlling the robots or control systems must exploit the possible parallelism of various control tasks in order to perform the necessary computations within given real-time and reliability constraints. Such software consists of both control programs written by application programmers and operating system software offering means of task scheduling, intertask communication, and device control. The Generalized Executive for real-time Multiprocessor applications (GEM) is an operating system that addresses several requirements of operating software. First, when using GEM, programmers can select one of two different types of tasks differing in size, called processes and microprocesses. Second, the scheduling calls offered by GEM permit the implementation of several models of task interaction. Third, GEM supports multiple models of communication with a parameterized communication mechanism. Fourth, GEM is closely coupled to prototype real-time programming environments that provide programming support for the models of computation offered by the operating system. GEM is being used on a multiprocessor with robotics application software of substantial size and complexity.

Adaptive Resource Management for Deployable HPC Systems

“…For such applications, it is simply not feasible to model accurately the per-event processing and communication needs. This class of applications includes radar systems [26], robots [7,35,39], target recognition, multi-object tracking, hypothesis testing [25].…”

Analysis of computational parallelism with a concurrent hierarchical robot control system

“…A survey of existing robot control systems provides numerous concurrent models. The requirement to satisfy real-time constraints has led to numerous implementations using robot control architectures with several processor boards on a common bus [8,12,13,19,20,22]. These architectures share common characteristics with the concurrent, hierarchical control model.…”

CLOCS (Computer with Low Context-Switching Time) Operating System Reference Documents

“…By varying these parameters, different communications models are supported: these paradigms have been reported to be the communications methods most used in realtime applications [19,14].…”