Distributed control of a free-floating underwater manipulation system

Robotic applications are real-time dynamical systems which intimately combine different components ranging from high-level decision making and discrete-event controllers to low-level feedback loops. Tightly coupling the two last components and considering them in a formal framework permitted, in a centralized approach, both crucial properties to be proved and efficient implementation. We examine this coupling in the case of an architecture where discrete-event and low-level controllers are spatially distributed and we propose, in the framework of the ORCCAD methodology, different methods for their implementation. Their impact to the verification process is analyzed. The experimental evaluation of the proposed techniques uses the IFREMER free-floating underwater manipulation system VORTEX-PALO The real-time programming aspects of the experiment are handled in the framework of the ORCCAD programming environment targeting the PIRAT real-time controller.