Improvement in the Computing Time of Robot Manipulators Using a Multimicroprocessor

Abstract

A multimicroprocessor having a hardware circuit designed to aid the synchronization of CPUs and software to schedule tasks on the CPUs is proposed. The system is applied to the calculation of the joint angles of six-axis robot manipulators. It is verified that the scheduling software gives the optimum schedule for an elbow manipulator and a sub-optimum one for the Stanford manipulator. Actual calculations on the multiprocessor verifies that the computing time is decreased to 3.6 ms by the proposed parallel processing using seven CPUs and seven APUs, while it takes about 20 ms by ordinary processing using one CPU and one APU.