The control of a toy robot ARM: a real time programming experience

The problem of controlling a non-intelligent toy robot arm at the device level renders itself as a perfect candidate for real-time programming applications because it involves the coordination of a set of concurrent activities which have to satisfy strict timing and space constraints. The problem can be tackled in a non-structured fashion by using ad-hoc programming techniques or in a more structured fashion which reveals the true nature of the problem and solves it in a general way extensible to similar problems. It is our belief that since the problem involves the coordination of concurrent activities the techniques used in the design and implementation of operating systems would better suit our requirements. It is shown that using the basic concepts of concurrency and their implementation can lead to the design of a general real-time scheduler which solves this and other related problems as well.