A new reactive operating system for human-robot interaction

Robots which interact and cooperate with humans are required to be sensitive to changes of their surrounding environment for handling physical resources and supporting open and distributed human-robot- computer systems. But it is difficult to incorporate sensitivity into real-time systems, and to identify the owner of a physical resource in an open and distributed human-robot-computer society. In this paper, we formulate a physical ownership model which is a possible solution to the managing of physical resources among humans and robots. Then we present a reactive operating system PULSER which supports the implementation of the model. A new interrupt mechanism is proposed to support sensitivity with real-time facility and a physical resource manager is implemented to support the ownership model. Also, we describe a new facility for wireless communication in open and distributed systems.