A MULTIPROCESSOR SYSTEM WITH APPLICATIONS TO HEXAPOD VEHICLE CONTROL

In this research, a multiprocessor system has been designed, and is used to control a Hexapod vehicle. The system is designed and implemented using five PDP-11/03's. A survey of multiprocessor systems has been made, which discusses different types of systems both in industry and in the laboratory. This work also discusses the characteristics of multiprocessor systems in several aspects such as task assignment, processor coupling, processor interconnection, system control, system reliability, operating systems, and the evaluation of an MPS system compared to a single processor. Then, the design of a multiprocessor system is discussed, including the interfacing circuit, and the system peripherals. Several software techniques have been developed to use the designed system, including the loading of programs, starting and stopping satellite processors, processor communications, and running Pascal programs.; In the application part, the paper presents the OSU Hexapod including the Hexapod hardware, the coordinate systems, wave gait generation, and the general control scheme. In particular the capacity of a multiprocessor to detect faults and recover from errors is explored. Four versions of the Hexapod control program for the multiprocessor system have been developed, namely: simple centralized control, centralized control with fault-tolerance, non-centralized control with fault-tolerance, and control scheme with force optimization. For each program, the control scheme is discussed followed by the organization of the program and system evaluation.