The RCS is comprised of a PUMA 560(shown left) manipulator, its associated Unimate Controller, and an Ironics 68030 VME SBC running Carnegie Mellon University's CHIMERA real-time robotic operating system. A Sun SparcStation 330 serves as the CHIMERA host and shares its VME bus with the Ironics Single-Board Computer (SBC) via BIT-3 VME-to-VME bus extenders.
A Datacube system is the main component of the VPS and consists of a Motorola MVME-147 SBC running OS-9, a Datacube MaxVideo20 video processor, a Datacube Max860 vector processor, and a BIT-3 VME-to-VME bus extender.
The VPS performs the optical flow, calculates the desired control input, and supplies the input vector via shared memory to the Ironics processor for inclusion as an input into the control software. The image processing is performed under a pipeline programming model using Datacube's ImageFlow libraries. The calculations required to produce the desired control input are executed on the 147 SBC and transferred to the RCS via the BIT-3 shared memory using a simple handshake technique for synchronization.