Timing analysis of a robot controller

Abstract

ABB Robotics has no methods for theoretical verication of the timing behavior of the robot control system. The system is complex, about 2,5 million line of code, distributed over 15 subsystems. When changing the system, it's hard to predict how that change will aect the temporal behavior. The system was not designed to explicitly support impact analysis. This has resulted in a \\trial-and-error " approach regarding temporal issues when adding new functionality. Timing related errors can be very costly, since they might occur only under very special conditions and thus might be hard to nd. This thesis proposes a solution to the problems. A set of tools and methods for verifying the temporal behavior is presented. The approach of this work is to enable the temporal analysis of the robot controller by enabling the simulation of a model. Since no existing solutions has been found, the development of a modelling language and a simulator is