Re: Great opportunity for Ada application

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Ada code to control servo motors? Yeah. Unclassified source exists to do
that. But that doesn't mean that a company would give it to you. Most would
consider it to be "proprietary" in some way. Besides, the code would likely
be very specific to the particular servo in question and to the particular
application.

It depends on what you want. The actual control laws that drives a given
actuator is typically rather small. You get a request, it does some rate and
range limiting, you have some kind of transfer function and you generate an
output. There's a bit more to it when you get into the minor loop closure,
but that is also very device and application specific. Most of the code goes
into failure detection and accommodation which again is very device and
application specific. Beyond that, you have an even larger hunk of code that
deals with the I/O and scheduling of your control laws - the Operating
System, if you will. Possibly you can use something off the shelf there, but
it depends a lot on what the box that is going to hold the whole thing looks
like.

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "Going cold turkey isn't as delicious as it sounds."
        -- H. Simpson
======================================================================

Robert C. Leif <rleif@rleif.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.5.1045152345.13246.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
I suspect that this is way too big a project. However, I do believe that an
Ada robotics and imaging group would be very useful. To that end, I am
creating a medical device, which will employ one or more servo motors. Is
their unclassified Ada source for these systems?
There is an Ada 83 imaging package. Unfortunately, the Ada that runs the
National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore has not been released.
Thus, a large part of the potential technology transfer benefits from this
very expensive undertaking has been lost.
Bob Leif