PROJECT TITLE :

Real-Time Software Pipelining for Multidomain Motion Controllers

ABSTRACT:

Motion control systems need an isochronal real-time guarantee that each control task should periodically produce outputs with no jitters. However, it is difficult to create up such a decent isochronal system with a multicore design and a general-purpose operating system, because the inherent resource sharing principle leads to massive jitters to the control tasks. This paper proposes a software pipelining framework for an EtherCAT-based mostly motion controller that achieves a good isochronal guarantee with that combination. The tight guarantee is potential by multicore partitioning and reservation-aware task phasing, that cut back resource contentions between the tasks on each stage of the pipeline. Through experiments, we tend to show that the proposed pipelining framework gives a good isochronal guarantee with high scalability in terms of the quantity of motion transactions. On a true 8-axis motion control platform with two processor cores dedicated to the pipeline and a slight modification of the Linux operating system, it achieves a maximum jitter of ten μs for four motion transactions with a typical period of 1.six ms, whereas a priority-driven methodology provides a most jitter of some tons of microsecond beneath the identical condition.