Intertask Communications in an Integrated Multirobot System

An integrated multirobot system (IMRS) consists of two or more robots, machinery, and sensors and is capable of executing almost all industrial processes with efficiency, flexibility, and reliability. Although the IMRS is motivated by an interesting application, it is essentially a distributed real-time processing system with various heterogeneous processes. To support a distributed modular architecture of the IMRS, low-level communication primitives are proposed along with their supporting language syntax which are typical of real-time concurrent programming languages. This is done by 1) carefully examining the generic structure and interactions of IMRS processes, 2) comparing and analyzing the primitives and syntax developed/proposed for general concurrent programming, and 3) using port-directed communications. © 1987 IEEE