schmidt@PESCADERO.STANFORD.EDU.UUCP (02/13/87)
CS 500 Computer Science Colloquium
Feb. 17, 4:15 pm, Skilling Auditorium
A Juggling Robot - Adventures in Real Time Control
by
Marc D. Donner
IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center
The computer community has generally addressed real-time control
problems in an ad-hoc fashion using tools designed for information
processing. In information processing the important issue is
ensuring that the correct calculations are carried out in the correct
order. In real-time problems there are deadlines that require that
the calculations be completed before a certain time to be correct.
This class of problems is interesting and is becoming more and more
important as we increasingly use computers to control things and not
just for information processing. In this talk I will describe work
in real-time control at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in
Yorktown Heights and in particular, the juggling machine that we are
constructing as a testbed for our ideas. This talk will cover the
engineering of the machine, the design and construction of
programming languages and operating systems for real-time control,
and interesting problems in the mathematics of juggling.