Hardware-software run-time systems and robotics: a case study

We present a sample implementation of a run time scheduler, split between hardware and software, controlling a real time robotics application. The hardware part of the run time scheduler, implemented as a finite state machine (FSM), schedules the tasks for the application and can be readily extended to include additional tasks in hardware or in software. The software part executes tasks based on which tasks are ready to execute as indicated by the FSM. We have successfully implemented the scheduler on a working prototype which shows the feasibility of our approach