A RISC processor based architecture for control and evaluation of grasping and manipulation with dexterous hands

The authors describe the computer architecture for the IRIS Facility, a versatile, multi-degree-of-freedom reconfigurable and expandable setup for research in grasping and manipulation. The proposed computer architecture involves powerful 10 MFLOPS RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processor nodes and a fast point-to-point communication network. Each node includes a host computer and parallel input/output modules. The nodes are controlled by nearly zero-overhead customized real-time OS kernels responsible for task scheduling, communication, and user-interface.<>