5. Conclusions

We've given a detailed presentation of how microprocessors work. In addition to their microprocessor, microcontrollers incorporate the essential elements for industrial system control, such as time and event management, input/output ports and programmable logic for interrupt handling. Industrial control systems include a software kernel offering more extensive services. For example, many industrial boards incorporate a real-time monitor in their ROM, enabling the creation and management of threads, semaphores and mutual exclusions. Thanks to these elements, control systems can be programmed using a separate lightweight process for the control of each subsystem. For example, to control a robot with several degrees of freedom (axes), a light-weight process can be associated with each axis, and these processes can be synchronized with a master process that manages all robot control. Control...