Design and Implementation of a High Power Robot Distributed Control System on Dependable Responsive Multithreaded Processor (D-RMTP)

The robotics field provides with many typical applications of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Robots are expected to be deployed in a wide variety of applications including life supporting work or disaster response and therefore they need to follow strict safety and dependability constraints. In order to create robots with high utility, safety and dependability, research has focused both on creating mechanically safe systems and safe control laws. Throughout the present work, we use the embedded real-time processor D-RMTP as a motor controller to attain high responsiveness on a high power robot. D-RMTP has a hardware mechanism to support hard real-time processing, which enables lower-jitter and lower-overhead processing compared with conventional software based real-time execution (Real-Time Task). Responsive Task, a real-time execution mechanism based on D-RMTP, has also been proposed in recent works. In this paper, we have evaluated the effects of the low-jitter and low-overhead performance of Responsive Task on a distributed robot control system. The result of the experiment showed that Responsive Task resulted in improving the control cycle speed and the responsiveness of the controller.