CHIMERA II: a real-time multiprocessing environment for sensor-based robot control

The CHIMERA II multiprocessing environment has been developed for use in a wide variety of sensor-based robot systems. It provides the flexibility, performance, and Unix-compatible interface needed for fast development of a real-time control code. The features of CHIMERA II include support for multiple general purpose CPUs; support for multiple special purpose CPUs and I/O devices; a real time multitasking kernel; user definable and dynamically selectable real-time schedulers; transparent access to a host file system; generalized and efficient interprocess and interboard communication; remote process synchronization; standardized interrupt and exception handlers; Unix-like environment, which supports most standard C system and library calls; support for hierarchical and horizontal control architectures, such as NASREM; and a user interface which serves to download, monitor, and debug code on any processor board and serves as a terminal interface to the executing code