A laboratory breadboard system for dual-arm teleoperation

The computing architecture of a novel dual-arm teleoperation system is described. The novelty of this system is that: (1) the master arm is not a replica of the slave arm; it is unspecific to any manipulator and can be used for the control of various robot arms with software modifications; and (2) the force feedback to the general purpose master arm is derived from force-torque sensor data originating from the slave hand. The computing architecture of this breadboard system is a fully synchronized pipeline with unique methods for data handling, communication and mathematical transformations. The computing system is modular, thus inherently extendable. The local control loops at both sites operate at 100 Hz rate, and the end-to-end bilateral (force-reflecting) control loop operates at 200 Hz rate, each loop without interpolation. This provides high-fidelity control. This end-to-end system elevates teleoperation to a new level of capabilities via the use of sensors, microprocessors, novel electronics, and real-time graphics displays. A description is given of a graphic simulation system connected to the dual-arm teleoperation breadboard system. High-fidelity graphic simulation of a telerobot (called Phantom Robot) is used for preview and predictive displays for planning and for real-time control under several seconds communication time delay conditions. High fidelity graphic simulation is obtained by using appropriate calibration techniques

A Problem Solving Environment for Network Computing

The current advances in high-speed networks and WWW technologies have made network computing a cost-effective high performance computing environment. New software development models and problem solving environments must be developed to utilize the network computing environment efficiently. In this paper we present Virtual Distributed Computing Environment (VDCE), which provides a problem solving environment for high-performance distributed computing over wide-area networks. VDCE enables scientists to develop distributed applications without knowing the detailed architecture of the underlying resources. VDCE provides well-defined library functions that relieve end users from tedious task implementations and it supports software reusability. The VDCE software architecture consists of two modules: Application Editor, and VDCE Runtime System. Application Editor is a Web-based graphical user interface that helps user to develop network applications and specifies the computing and communication properties of each task within the applications. The VDCE Runtime System schedules the individual tasks of the application to the best available resources, runs, and manages the application execution on the assigned resources. We also present how VDCE can be used as a problem solving environment and how the users can experiment and evaluate the performance of their applications for different VDCE hardware and/or software configurations

Cost-optimized heterogeneous FPGA architecture for non-iterative hologram generation.

The generation of computer-generated holograms (CGHs) requires a significant amount of computational power. To accelerate the process, highly parallel field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are deemed to be a promising computing platform to implement non-iterative hologram generation algorithms. In this paper, we present a cost-optimized heterogeneous FPGA architecture based on a one-step phase retrieval algorithm for CGH generation. The results indicate that our hardware implementation is 2.5× faster than the equivalent software implementation on a personal computer with a high-end multi-core CPU. Trade-offs between cost and performance are demonstrated, and we show that the proposed heterogeneous architecture can be used in a compact display system that is cost and size optimized

yourSky: rapid desktop access to custom astronomical image mosaics

The yourSky custom astronomical image mosaicking software has a Web portal architecture that allows access via ordinary desktop computers with low bandwidth network connections to high performance and highly customizable mosaicking software deployed in a high performance computing and communications environment. The emphasis is on custom access to image mosaics constructed from terabytes of raw image data stored in remote archives. In this context, custom access refers to new technology that enables on the fly mosaicking to meet user-specified criteria for region of the sky to be mosaicked, datasets to be used, resolution, coordinate system, projection, data type and image format. The yourSky server is a fully automated end-to-end system that handles all aspects of the mosaic construction. This includes management of mosaic requests, determining which input images are required to fulfill each request, management of a data cache for both input image plates and output mosaics, retrieval of input image plates from massive remote archives, image mosaic construction on a multiprocessor system, and making the result accessible to the user on the desktop. The URL for yourSky is http://yourSky.jpl.nasa.gov