transputer-based fault-tolerant robot controller

In recent years robots have become increasingly important in many areas. A robotic controller requires high speed and high reliability and its design must continue these two aspects. This thesis presents a design for a Transputer based fault tolerant robot controller. For concreteness, we have designed this controller for a specific robot, the SEDAB, a prototype developed by IBM Corp. This design attempts to satisfy the two requirements of speed and reliability. Speed is achieved by the use of a concurrent structure composed of Transputers. Reliability is provided by a self-testing mechanism and a multiprocessor system architecture. The Occam implementation of the robot processes is described. We have evaluated the reliability of this controller. The reliability study shows that there is a significant increase in the reliability of this controller due to the new architecture and proposed fault detection mechanism. While we have not been able to actually control this robot, we have shown that some scheduling heuristics can be effectively used to provide a higher level of performance.