Concurrent C and robotics

Abstract

Many current robot systems exhibit a significant degree of concurrency, doing many activities in parallel. Future sensor-based robots are expected to exhibit even more concurrency. Programs to control such robots are characterized by the need to wait for external events and/or handle interrupts, deal with concurrent activities, synchronize actions with external events and communicate with other robots/processes. In this paper, we focus on the advantages of concurrent programming for robotics and suggest that a general purpose language with the right facilities is a good vehicle for robot programming. In this context we will discuss Concurrent C, an upward-compatible extension of the C language that provides high-level concurrent programming facilities. We give a brief description of Concurrent C followed by a description of how Concurrent C programs communicate with robots and devices. We then show, by means of examples, all of which were implemented, how Concurrent C simplifies the writing of robot programs. Of specific interest are the process interaction and related interrupt handling facilities.