The authors discuss a concurrent programming environment and its application to a two-arm cooperative manipulation experiment on RIPS (robot instruction processing system). RIPS is a hierarchical multiprocessor architecture in which various custom and general-purpose processors are applied to a partitioning of the robot control problem. The system provides hardware support for synchronization and communication primitives, making it easier to write concurrent programs for RIPS' heterogeneous processors. The experiment demonstrated the viability of RIPS in supporting computationally intensive robot control methodologies, and as a byproduct has helped to develop a parallel programming environment for RIPS, called USE RIPS (user software environment for RIPS). By building USE RIPS on Unix and using a layered approach, it is possible to adapt or make use of various existing programs and utilities, such as the GNU and C++ compilers.>

The design and simulation of RIPS, a robotic instruction processing system, are discussed. The authors are building a prototype version of RIPS which will be used as a general research tool to study problems of robot control. The architecture of RIPS is geared for robot control, yet the system is general and fully programmable and does not assume any manipulator characteristics. There is sufficient computing capacity to address any of several important automation problems such as force control, multiple manipulator coordination, or manufacturing cell-level control. Simulations show that using RIPS to control a Stanford manipulator with the computed torque method gives an update rate of 255 mu s. This simulation includes all interprocessor communication as well as the computing time necessary for equation evaluation.>