A Distributed Control System for the CMU Rover.

Abstract

This paper describes a distributed control structure developed for the CMU Rover, an advanced mobile robot equipped with a variety of sensors. Expert modules are used to control the operation of the sensors and actuators, interpret incoming data, build an internal model of the robot's environment, devise strategies to accomplish proposed tasks and execute these strategies. Each expert module is composed of a master process and a slave process, where the master process controls the scheduling and working of the slave process. Communication among expert modules occurs asynchronously with the aid of a blackboard. Information specific to the execution of a given task is provided through a control plan. The system is distributed over a network of processors. Operating system kernels local to each processor and an interprocess message communication mechanism ensure transparency of the underlying network structure. The various parts of the system are presented in this paper and future work to be performed is mentioned. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 27, 1983
Accession Number
ADA133201

Entities

People

  • Alberto Elfes
  • Sarosh N. Talukdar

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Actuators
  • Assembly
  • Automated Speech Recognition
  • Autonomous Vehicles
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Control Systems
  • Detectors
  • Environment
  • Motion Planning
  • Operating Systems
  • Parallel Computing
  • Parallel Processing
  • Robotics
  • Robots
  • Scheduling (Production)
  • Simulators

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control