Design principles for a real-time robot control system

Abstract

The design of multiprocessor hierarchical robot control systems is examined from the application viewpoint. A concurrent communication and control algorithm is presented as the generic software component of the control system in an attempt to reduce the complexity and increase the reliability of the overall design. Some design principles that informally guarantee the correctness of the algorithm are proposed. These principles help at a lower level of design abstraction where the actual components of the computer system architecture need to avoid functional problems such as deadlock, starved processes, poor performance, and other design shortcomings