A Parallel Solution Of Inverse Kinematics For The Rtx Robot Using Ada And Transputers
In adaptive robots on-line sensor corrections are generally specified relative to a "world" co-ordinate system, whereas the manipulator is actuated in a joint co-ordinate system. Thus the real-time execution of what is known as the Inverse Kinematics Algorithm (IKA) is very important. To decrease execution times, parallel processing supported by a multi-processor architecture were used. Of special interest was the use of the Ada programming language, normally associated with large systems, and its inherent facilities for parallel processing. Taking as an example an inverse kinematics algorithm for the RTX robot, a method was used to change the algorithm from a sequential form to a parallel form suitable for implementation on a multi-processor system. The Algorithm was then implemented on Ada targeted to a multi-transputer system. Performance was then evaluated for a variety of transputer configurations and compared to equivalent implementations written in Occam. We conclude that although there are a number of transputer configurations that can fulfil realistic performance criteria, the selected implementation of Ada does not make it a viable option for a cost-effective implementation of co-ordinate transformation for the selected robot.