A real-time communication mechanism for RTLinux

This article proposes a new real-time communication mechanism called RT-Messenger. This mechanism is designed to handle communication messages with interrupt-level priority. Although RT-Messenger is independent of communication devices, we implemented this mechanism to support an Ethernet as an additional function of RTLinux, a real-time extended Linux. Some performance evaluations show that this mechanism is fast enough to communicate and to synchronize between two real-time programs which run on different computers. Also, an experimental result shows that two robot systems were successfully controlled bilaterally.