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 Robotics / 10013
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Subject: 
Re: Multitasking
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Thu, 13 Jan 2000 18:39:03 GMT
Original-From: 
alex wetmore <ALEX@PHRED.ORGsaynotospam>
Viewed: 
810 times
  
From: "David Leeper" <david.leeper@destiny.com>
I removed the multitasking features from my cruise and avoid code last • night
and discovered the robot runs smoother, using less code, and less RCX
variables.

Cruise and avoid is a pretty simple type of program, and multitasking really
isn't necessary.  I wrote a sublimation version of it mostly to play with
the concepts of sublimation.  Two nights ago I wrote the same program using
LegOS and used a more traditional loop there.  The two versions are:

http://www.phred.org/~alex/lego/wander.nqc
http://www.phred.org/~alex/lego/wander.c

I think that the sublimation model becomes a lot more powerful as you have
many inputs to monitor and build more complex robots.  My cruise and avoid
robots really only have one input to watch -- some sort of bump detection (a
rotation sensor in the above examples).

An example of a robot type where I think that sublimation would be useful is
trying to build a balancing and steering vehicle such as a bicycle.  Alex
Nicolaou and I started talking about this in private email a few days ago.
Here you might want a high priority task which makes the minor steering and
weight-shift movements necessary to keep the bike balanced, while having a
lower priority task which controls the same steering and weight-shift
movements to allow the bike to turn.  We'll see how this works out once I
have time to build such a robot.

Conclusion: multitasking isn't necessary or optimal for all tasks, but it
can be useful in more complex tasks.

alex



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Multitasking
 
Hi Alex, I was thinking this over last night and was wondering about how sleeping a task would affect an application that requires precise timing. In the bicycle example, what would happen if the balancing task was asleep when the bicycle began to (...) (25 years ago, 14-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics)
  Re: Multitasking
 
Hi Alex, I was thinking this over last night and was wondering about how sleeping a task would affect an application that requires precise timing. In the bicycle example, what would happen if the balancing task was asleep when the bicycle began to (...) (25 years ago, 14-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  Multitasking
 
I removed the multitasking features from my cruise and avoid code last night and discovered the robot runs smoother, using less code, and less RCX variables. David Leeper (just wanted to pass this along to those thinking about multitasking) (25 years ago, 13-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics)

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