What are some key enabling technologies for robotics?
Robots are inherently parallel. In traditional single-core systems and multi-tasking OSs we are really just time slicing to get the appearance of different parts of the application running at the same time. This can be sufficient for some applications but when many operations are being performed or high-speed response is needed, parallel architectures become very important. Multi-core processors and FPGAs are technologies that can greatly benefit robots. With a multi-core processor running LabVIEW Real-time, developers can isolate the control algorithm for the robot onto one core to ensure it runs at the desired loop rate and use the other cores on the processor for lower priority tasks or to perform specific signal processing. With FPGAs, developers are able to define as many parallel running portions of their application as the FPGA fabric allows. The challenge with FPGAs, however, is the specialized VHDL programming knowledge required to program them. A focus of LabVIEW FPGA, which
