Re: Mini meeting Toulouse 22-23 april / Execution Engine

Herman Bruyninckx wrote:

> On monday afternoon (22 april) and tuesday morning (23 april), Peter
> Soetens and myself will be in Toulouse, to discuss the design and the
> implementation of the ``execution engine'' for Orocos. This design has
> been inspired very heavily by the Genom software of LAAS, but is
> incorporating some interesting new ideas.
>
> The execution engine is to become the motor of an Orocos component,
> that is responsible for the correct sequencing of a task execution,
> taking care of synchronization, atomic execution, and reporting
> on the task progress.

Dear all,

What I think is important to consider is that there are several ways of
organizing the internal strucuture of a component despite the use of a
particular "execution engine". For example, the state mechanism provided
by the "SmartConfiguration" class has also been used successfully in
three layer architectures with a task net execution mechanism on top of
the various components. That state mechanism works different to the Genom
approach and I think both have their particular strengths and weaknesses.

The key with respect to configuration has been the fact that one can
abort blocking communication calls if one wants to enforce a component to
reach a particular state. Therefore I am always pointing out that there
is a relationship between the state change mechanism and the
communication patterns.

My implementation of the communication patterns on top of CORBA has made
great progress so far and I will post the sources with examples in time
for the Toulouse meeting. I also include a small example which shows how
an enforced state change to a particular neutral state (where a component
does nothing anymore) aborts a blocking query to reach the neutral state
as fast as possible.

Regards

Christian

>
> If somebody is interested in this matter, and is able to come to
> Toulouse on one of these days, we would welcome any constructive
> discussion and contribution we can get :-)
>
> Herman
>
> --
> K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
> <http://www.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc>  +32 16 322480
>
> _______________________________________________
> Orocos mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mail.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/mailman/listinfo/orocos

--

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Christian Schlegel
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