Real-Time Interrupt-driven Concurrency (RTIC) for Modern Application Processors

Modern robot control software is becoming increasingly complex due to the integration of real-time and non-real-time software. This poses a problem because these applications have different requirements for the Operating System (OS). Real-time control requires deterministic execution times, which General Purpose Operating Systems (GPOS) like Linux cannot guarantee, while complex non-real-time software is highly integrated with OS services that Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) do not provide.

This problem is commonly solved by either using multiple hardware units, which greatly increases complexity and costs, or hardening GPOS kernels, which sacrifices performance. An alternative Real-Time Interrupt-driven Concurrency (RTIC) based solution is proposed. RTIC is a lightweight framework, where tasks are run to completion in interrupt routines and are scheduled by the hardware. The goal of this project is to integrate RTIC into GPOS to allow deterministic execution of real-time tasks, while simultaneously running other non-real-time software on the same hardware.