Case studies of realtime multiprocessors in robotics

The National Research Council has conducted research on sensor-based robotics for many years. Three of the many applications built are described here. The first is a motion system controller, capable of coordinating the actions of multiple robot arms. The second is a tracking system, which uses a pair of laser range finders to enable a robot arm to track, and to grasp, an object in motion. The third is an autonomous mobile vehicle, which uses a variety of sensors to navigate through a partially known environment. For each of the three applications, the main realtime processing was done on a multiprocessor made up of multiple commercial single board computers on a VMEbus. The single board computers were all Motorola 68020 based, had about a megabyte of RAM, and had various onboard peripherals. Each of the three applications involves other computers, connected by communications links. All three examples were implemented with the Harmony portable multitasking multiprocessing realtime operating system