| In order to study the sensory-based robot control problem, a real-time multi-tasking control system has been designed and implemented. One of the important features of this system is that it uses multiple computers to run multiple robot control tasks in a distributed environment. It is scalable and reconfigurable, and one can easily add or remove an application task to meet his own application requirement. This real-time multi-tasking robot control system consists of three PC computers. Data acquisition process runs on one PC, where hardware A/D and D/A interface cards reside inside, and they serve the sensory data acquisition application. Servo controller process runs on another PC and it performs servo level robot hand control application. The graphical user interface and trajectory planning processes are located in the third PC. The system runs on a QNX real-time operating system. An Ethernet network connects the PCs. Some real-time robot control issues are also studied, including open architecture network control, direct memory access, interrupt handling, shared memory and interprocess communication. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
