A concept for distributed control systems

HEROS (hierarchically extendible real-time operating system), which was developed and implemented for the control and supervision of robots, is described. It allows the dynamic creation of processes and their management. The processes in HEROS have no knowledge of their mutual existence and possess no global kernel routines or variables. The interprocess communication and synchronization is accomplished through a channel mechanism, using simple and effective functional calls. The uncoupling of processes attained through the channel concept enables the tasks to be defined and implemented independently and to be operated in parallel. HEROS is composed of several clusters connected through a local area network (LAN). Each cluster consists of several conventional single-board computers, a global memory, and a network controller