A real-time model for the robotic highway safety marker system

We present the design and implementation of a real-time model for the global control of robotic highway safety markers. Problems addressed in the system are: 1) poor scalability and predictability as the number of markers increases, 2) jerky movement of markers, and 3) false-hits caused by environment objects. We extensively analyze the system and offer two solutions: a basic solution and an enhanced solution. They are built respectively upon two task models: the periodic task model and the variable rate execution task model. The former is characterized by four static parameters: phase, period, worst case execution time and relative deadline. The latter has similar parameters. Its parameter values, however, are allowed to change at arbitrary times. We then examine two typical real-time scheduling approaches: rate monotonic (RM) priority driven and earliest deadline first (EDF). Analysis of their sufficient conditions shows that our system is feasibly schedulable under either RM or EDF. This conclusion justifies that the path for each safety marker can be guaranteed to be smooth under the designed real-time system. For the scalability issue, we present a sufficient condition for the upper bound on the number of barrel robots that can be reliably controlled. One key technique integrated into our real-time system is the Hough transform. We refine its traditional implementation so that, for the task of detecting safety markers, the time complexity decreases and the reliability increases with only slight additional storage for search windows. The basic idea behind our improvements is to limit the search window for safety markers.