Real-time platforms and environments for time constrained flexible manufacturing

The Spring Kernel and associated algorithms, languages, and tools provide system support for static or dynamic real-time applications that require predictable operation. Spring currently consists of two major parts: (1) the development environment, where application and target systems are described, preprocessed and downloaded, and (2) the run-time environment, where the operating system, the Spring Kernel, creates and ensures predictable executions of application tasks. We have integrated our real-time systems technology with component technologies from robotics, computer vision, and real-time artificial intelligence, to develop a test platform for flexible manufacturing. The results being produced are generic so that they should be in many other real-time applications such as air traffic control and chemical plants. We describe this platform, identify new features developed, and comment on some lessons learned to date from this experiment