SIGNAL is a language designed for safe real-time system programming. It is based on semantics defined by mathematical modeling of multiple-clocked flows of data and events. Relations can be defined on such data and event signals to describe arbitrary dynamical systems and then constraints may be used to develop real time applications. There are operators to relate the clocks and values of the signals. SIGNAL can be also described as synchronous data-flow language.
Although SIGNAL is not designed specifically for robotics, the characteristic of robot programming and SIGNAL’s mentioned functionalities makes it possible to use it for active vision-based robotic systems. Since the vision data have a synchronous and continuous nature, it can be captured in signals and then the control functions between the sensory data and control outputs can be defined. The SIGNAL-GTi extension of SIGNAL can be used for task sequencing at the discrete level.
SIGNAL-GTi enables the definition of time intervals related to the signals and also provides methods to specify hierarchical preemptive tasks. Combining the data flow and multitasking paradigms results in having the advantages of both the automata and concurrent robot programming. Using these advantages a hierarchy of parallel automata can be designed. The planning level of robot control does not have a counterpart in SIGNAL but the task level can be used for this purpose.
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