Parallel Fault Tolerant Robot Control

Most robot controllers today employ a single processor architecture As robot control requirements become more complex these serial controllers have di culty providing the desired response time Additionally with robots being used in environments that are hazardous or inaccessible to humans fault tolerant robotic systems are particularly desirable A uniprocessor control architecture cannot o er tolerance of processor faults Use of multiple processors for robot control o ers two advantages over single processor systems Parallel control provides a faster response which in turn allows a ner granularity of control Processor fault tolerance is also made possible by the existence of multiple processors There is a trade o between performance and the level of fault tolerance provided This paper describes a shared memory multiprocessor robot controller that is capable of providing high performance and processor fault tolerance We evaluate the performance of this controller and demonstrate how performance and processor fault tolerance can be balanced in a cost e ective manner