24,276 research outputs found
THREAD: A programming environment for interactive planning-level robotics applications
THREAD programming language, which was developed to meet the needs of researchers in developing robotics applications that perform such tasks as grasp, trajectory design, sensor data analysis, and interfacing with external subsystems in order to perform servo-level control of manipulators and real time sensing is discussed. The philosophy behind THREAD, the issues which entered into its design, and the features of the language are discussed from the viewpoint of researchers who want to develop algorithms in a simulation environment, and from those who want to implement physical robotics systems. The detailed functions of the many complex robotics algorithms and tools which are part of the language are not explained, but an overall impression of their capability is given
Admission Control and Scheduling for High-Performance WWW Servers
In this paper we examine a number of admission control and scheduling protocols for high-performance web servers based on a 2-phase policy for serving HTTP requests. The first "registration" phase involves establishing the TCP connection for the HTTP request and parsing/interpreting its arguments, whereas the second "service" phase involves the service/transmission of data in response to the HTTP request. By introducing a delay between these two phases, we show that the performance of a web server could be potentially improved through the adoption of a number of scheduling policies that optimize the utilization of various system components (e.g. memory cache and I/O). In addition, to its premise for improving the performance of a single web server, the delineation between the registration and service phases of an HTTP request may be useful for load balancing purposes on clusters of web servers. We are investigating the use of such a mechanism as part of the Commonwealth testbed being developed at Boston University
Robot graphic simulation testbed
The objective of this research was twofold. First, the basic capabilities of ROBOSIM (graphical simulation system) were improved and extended by taking advantage of advanced graphic workstation technology and artificial intelligence programming techniques. Second, the scope of the graphic simulation testbed was extended to include general problems of Space Station automation. Hardware support for 3-D graphics and high processing performance make high resolution solid modeling, collision detection, and simulation of structural dynamics computationally feasible. The Space Station is a complex system with many interacting subsystems. Design and testing of automation concepts demand modeling of the affected processes, their interactions, and that of the proposed control systems. The automation testbed was designed to facilitate studies in Space Station automation concepts
Magic-State Functional Units: Mapping and Scheduling Multi-Level Distillation Circuits for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Architectures
Quantum computers have recently made great strides and are on a long-term
path towards useful fault-tolerant computation. A dominant overhead in
fault-tolerant quantum computation is the production of high-fidelity encoded
qubits, called magic states, which enable reliable error-corrected computation.
We present the first detailed designs of hardware functional units that
implement space-time optimized magic-state factories for surface code
error-corrected machines. Interactions among distant qubits require surface
code braids (physical pathways on chip) which must be routed. Magic-state
factories are circuits comprised of a complex set of braids that is more
difficult to route than quantum circuits considered in previous work [1]. This
paper explores the impact of scheduling techniques, such as gate reordering and
qubit renaming, and we propose two novel mapping techniques: braid repulsion
and dipole moment braid rotation. We combine these techniques with graph
partitioning and community detection algorithms, and further introduce a
stitching algorithm for mapping subgraphs onto a physical machine. Our results
show a factor of 5.64 reduction in space-time volume compared to the best-known
previous designs for magic-state factories.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure
Flight program language requirements. Volume 1: Executive summary
The activities and results of a study for the definition of flight program language requirements are described. A set of detailed requirements are presented for a language capable of supporting onboard application programming for the Marshall Space Flight Center's anticipated future activities in the decade of 1975-85. These requirements are based, in part, on the evaluation of existing flight programming language designs to determine the applicability of these designs to flight programming activities which are anticipated. The coding of benchmark problems in the selected programming languages is discussed. These benchmarks are in the form of program kernels selected from existing flight programs. This approach was taken to insure that the results of the study would reflect state of the art language capabilities, as well as to determine whether an existing language design should be selected for adaptation
Development of a prototype multi-processing interactive software invocation system
The Interactive Software Invocation System (NASA-ISIS) was first transported to the M68000 microcomputer, and then rewritten in the programming language Path Pascal. Path Pascal is a significantly enhanced derivative of Pascal, allowing concurrent algorithms to be expressed using the simple and elegant concept of Path Expressions. The primary results of this contract was to verify the viability of Path Pascal as a system's development language. The NASA-ISIS implementation using Path Pascal is a prototype of a large, interactive system in Path Pascal. As such, it is an excellent demonstration of the feasibility of using Path Pascal to write even more extensive systems. It is hoped that future efforts will build upon this research and, ultimately, that a full Path Pascal/ISIS Operating System (PPIOS) might be developed
MOSS, an evaluation of software engineering techniques
An evaluation of the software engineering techniques used for the development of a Modular Operating System (MOSS) was described. MOSS is a general purpose real time operating system which was developed for the Concept Verification Test (CVT) program. Each of the software engineering techniques was described and evaluated based on the experience of the MOSS project. Recommendations for the use of these techniques on future software projects were also given
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