Operating System Support for Animate Vision

Animate vision systems couple computer vision and robotics to achieve robust and accurate vision, as well as other complex behavior. These systems combine low-level sensory processing and effector output with high-level cognitive planning-all computationally intensive tasks that can benefit from parallel processing. A typical animate vision application will likely consist of many tasks, each of which may require a different parallel programming model, and all of which must cooperate to achieve the desired behavior. These multi-model programs require an underlying software system that not only supports several different models of parallel computation simultaneously, but which also allows tasks implemented in different models to interact. This paper describes the Psyche multiprocessor operating system, which was designed to support multi-model programming, and the Rochester Checkers Player, a multi-model robotics program that plays checkers against a human opponent. Psyche supports a variety of parallel programming models within a single operating system by according first-class status to processes implemented in user space. It also supports interactions between programming models using model-independent communication, wherein different types of processes communicate and synchronize without relying on the semantics or implementation of a particular programming model. The implementation of the Checkers Player, in which different parallel programming models are used for vision, robot motion planning, and strategy, illustrates the use of the Psyche mechanisms in an application program, and demonstrates many of the advantages of multi-model programming for animate vision systems.