Computational architecture for the Utah/MIT hand

This paper presents the computational architecture for the Utah-MIT hand, and discusses design issues encountered in its hardware and software development. The large number of linkages, actuators, and sensors offers a potentially severe computational burden for control; a multiprocessor hardware configuration has been developed to distribute this computation. In the interests of efficiency, minimal operating systems were devised for each processor which nevertheless were made sufficiently general for task scheduling, intertask communication, and debugging. This computational architecture is a general system which is potentially useful for other robotics applications.