9503992 Hollis The objectives of this project are: (1) providing the postdoctoral research associate with a rich environment for extending previous work in distributed real-time control of dynamic systems to the problem domain principally of manufacturing automation; (2) to contribute in the area of distributed control to the developing project in miniature factories, and (3) to provide a means for the associate to broaden the exposure to a wide variety of research topics within several units of the university. Given the relatively constant cost of mechanical actuators and mechanisms in contrast to the continuing advances in price, size, and performance of computers it is inevitable that computational processes become as pervasive and distributed as their mechanical counterparts. The intent of this research project is to `egin exploration of scientifically grounded approaches to the construction of such systems. Specifically, distributed real-time control systems will be constructed primarily to support a highly modular (in mechanical hardware, computational hardware, and software) miniature assembly system. The proposed controller architecture makes use of an event driven model for parallel processing to afford the necessarily high levels of software and hardware modularity, both of which will allow for rapid and efficient system development and reconfiguration without risking catastrophic failure due to unforeseen computational hardware or software interactions. ***
