This project addresses concern that robots encounter great difficulty in performing complex manipulation tasks because their control systems are unable to meet the real time demands of advanced control algorithms. The research goal is to address this issue by improving a recently developed computer architecture which has shown promise in this area. The architecture combines multiprocessing and vector processing to achieve extremely high computational speeds. Some preliminary effort has been devoted to the development of the concept entitled Robotic Instruction Processing System (RIPS). The research objectives of the project are (a) to optimize the RIPS architecture by analyzing operating system requirements, high level language compiler requirements, overall execution speed, idle processor time, breaks in the execution pipeline, and requirements on memory and register file size, and (b) to perform cooperative manipulation of two robot arms using a dynamic force control method. The RIPS architecture is to be optimized by performing two experiments, one involving the development of a two arm robot control system, and the second involving the design of system software.
