Dynamic Scheduling for Obstacle Avoidance in Mobile Robots

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Balch, Tucker
Forbes, Harold C.
Schwan, Karsten
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In robotics applications the speed at which a task may be completed is often
limited by computation rather than actuator or sensor throughput. This
research concerns the efficient threads-based implementation of motor
schema-based reactive navigation. One result of this implementation is the
insight that best effort scheduling offers significant performance advantages
on single- and multi-processor architectures over static priority or
round-robin scheduling. However, robot safety requires guaranteed rather than
best effort scheduling, and low latency is important, in addition, to allow
the robot to respond quickly to the real world. This paper presents the design
and initial implementation results of a distributed, real-time, multiprocessor,
dynamic scheduler offering both good quality scheduling decisions as well as
low scheduling latency for individual tasks. Lastly, based on our results, we
present a design for schema-based robot control when higher-level planning
tasks are integrated with lower level reactive navigation.