GENERAL-PURPOSE CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR PROGRAMMABLE AUTOMATION RESEARCH. .

This paper proposes a general-purpose, highly configurable controller architecture for a wide variety of sensor-based programmable automation equipment. When fully implemented, this system will provide a flexible programming and computational environment to support a wide range of research spanning the development of new functional technology, manipulator motion control methods, explicit programming, model-based program generation, and integrated manufacturing experiments. The system consists of an interactive Programming System connected through a shared memory to a multiple-processor Real Time System that performs time-critical operations. The Programming System executes programs written in an enhanced version of AML and transmits high level commands, called verbs, to the Real Time System for execution. The processes themselves are specified as data flow graphs involving computational functions and shared state vector variables.