Robot Scheduling System

The Robot Scheduling System acts like a small operating system and allows easy control of multiple systems at the same time. It provides the comfort and organization of not having to worry about execution of tasks for the robot and the easy ability to execute and monitor several activities on the robot at the same time.

Overview

The scheduling system bases its operation on dividing the robot into different systems, each represented in a different class and provides logic for actuator control and sensor input:

Each system can have one action running on it at any given time. That action is responsible for executing programmed control algorithms for that system. The actions are executed by the scheduler:

Subsystem

A system on a robot can be the drive system which controls the drive motors, or a simple arm controlled by a single motor. In either case, each system is represented by the Subsystem class. To create a system, your class must extend Subsystem but there is no need to implement any method, the base is simply logic for control.

A Subsystem can have only one action running on it at any given time. This allows us to avoid control complications with that systems.

In addition, each system can have a default action: an action which will start running on the system if no other action is running at the moment.

Action

An action is represented by the class Action. To create an Action, simply extend the class and implement necessary methods. An action can be executed multiple times and can depend on multiple systems (the requirements). Once started, the execution process of an action is as following:

• A check is performed to insure no other action is running on any of the required systems. If there are actions, they are canceled and their execution is stopped.
• The action then starts and initialize is called.
• While still executing:
  • execute is called
  • isFinished is called. If it returns true the action stops execution, otherwise execution continues.
• When execution is done, if isFinished returned true then end is called, otherwise interrupted is called.

There are 2 instances where interrupted can be called:

• Someone called the cancel method to manually stop the action.
• The scheduler canceled the action because another started running with an overlapping system requirement.

Scheduler

The scheduler is responsible for execution of Actions and is represented by the class Scheduler. The scheduler can execute both Runnable objects and Action objects. It is a singleton class (Has only one instance). The scheduler is also responsible for start default actions for systems and for avoiding execution of several actions on one system.

To run the scheduler cycle, which is responsible for execution and monitoring, call the run method. It should be called periodically to allow for continuous execution.

To add a Runnable object for execution, call addTask, and to remove it, call remove. But when working with Action objects, use the start and cancel methods in Action instead.

When creating a Subsystem it will be automatically registered into the scheduler so that it could be monitored for default action execution.