Real-time Control System

RCS prescribes a hierarchical control model based on a set of well-founded engineering principles to organize system complexity.

The RCS reference model architecture combines real-time motion planning and control with high level task planning, problem solving, world modeling, recursive state estimation, tactile and visual image processing, and acoustic signature analysis.

In fact, the evolution of the RCS concept has been driven by an effort to include the best properties and capabilities of most, if not all, the intelligent control systems currently known in the literature, from subsumption to SOAR, from blackboards to object-oriented programming.

RCS was inspired by a theoretical model of the cerebellum, the portion of the brain responsible for fine motor coordination and control of conscious motions.

[2] RCS has evolved through a variety of versions over a number of years as understanding of the complexity and sophistication of intelligent behavior has increased.

The application was to control a robot arm with a structured light vision system in visual pursuit tasks.

[2] CMAC becomes a state machine when some of its outputs are fed directly back to the input, so RCS-1 was implemented as a set of state-machines arranged in a hierarchy of control levels.

The VJ modules contain processes that compute cost, benefit, and risk of planned actions, and that place value on objects, materials, territory, situations, events, and outcomes.

RCS-3 will continue to be used for less demanding applications, such as manufacturing, construction, or telerobotics for near-space, or shallow undersea operations, where environments are more structured and communication bandwidth to a human interface is less restricted.

[2] In the figure, an example of the RCS methodology for designing a control system for autonomous onroad driving under everyday traffic conditions is summarized in six steps.

[18] The result of step 3 is that each organizational unit has for each input command a state-table of ordered production rules, each suitable for execution by an extended finite state automaton (FSA).

[18] Based on the RCS Reference Model Architecture the NIST has developed a Real-time Control System Software Library.