Hi,
I just received a grant to set up a robotic grasping-type manipulation
platform, which will involve the coordinated control of three industrial robots
with 6 degrees of freedom each. Since the standard controllers won't work to
achieve the type of precise coordination we need, I am just buying the robots
with the motors and encoders and have to put together the control hardware
myself.
My budget contains enough money to buy QNX, but I'm also considering RTLinux.
Although I've done things like recompiling the kernel many more times than I
care to admit, I'm not really a hard core programmer and am a little insecure
with respect to all the programming that may be involved.
Any insight into any or all of the following would be *greatly* appreciated.
1. Aside from rtlinux.org and the links therefrom, are there any web resources
I should have checked before emailing this list (sorry if this is the case), or
any that are particularly useful?
2. Does anyone have any experience regarding particular motion control boards
under RTLinux that can offer advice about what to get or avoid? Does any
motion control board manufacturer actually support (officially or otherwise)
RTLinux?
3. Since I need to control 18 degrees of freedom, if the motion control board
we choose has less than, say, 8 axes, we will need an extended backplane
computer or other special bus architecture to provide enough slots for the
boards. Are there any potentially major problems lurking here?
4. I'm new to real time programming, but my naive guess is that the decision
between QNX and RTLinux simply boils down to whether the built-in support that
I will get from some boards is worth the cost of the operating system. Will we
be pretty much on our own when it comes to writing a driver for whatever board
we buy, or is there a long list of them for which drivers already have been
written? I bought the "Writing Device Drivers" book, but, really, is it any
big deal to write a device driver, having never done it before?
5. Does anyone have direct experience with both QNX and RTLinux, and if so,
from the operating system point of view what are the relative advantages of
each? Does QNX support SMP?
6. Any other comments or advice.
Thanks in advance for any help,
Bill
--
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Bill Goodwine
Assistant Professor
Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
phone: 219.631.3283
fax: 219.631.8341
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
www: http://controls.ame.nd.edu/~bill
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