Robot control in a message passing environment: theoretical questions and preliminary experiments

2 Introduction intuition in the simple ten-node networks described here, we are interested in real-time computation of algorithms whose complexity must grow exponentially with the degrees of freedom [16]. Thus, we conclude that a much more systematic attack upon distributed real-time control design will be needed. This paper is organized as follows. In the next section we offer a sketch of the large body of literature addressing such issues as correctness, latency, and models of concurrency that arise in this work. Section 3 then focuses upon certain aspects of timeliness in distributed controller performance that seem to have been relatively ignored in the literature to date. In particular, we introduce the notion of a cross latencu matrix , and provide some experimental evidence of the subtlety in its causal