Soviet terminator
On June 5 and 6, 2015, the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) , the largest robot competition, took place in Pomona (California ) . Their organizer, the Agency for Advanced Defense Research and Development of the United States ( DARPA ), set as its goal to find the best autonomous machine that can replace a person in the aftermath of emergencies.
But few know that a similar project was launched in the USSR in 1990.
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The main task is reconnaissance under conditions of strong radiation in the rubble of the Chernobyl NPP .
In those days, such projects were of a closed nature and they were given a high level of secrecy, so I can’t give exact dates for the start of development.
The main contractor was NIIKP , the manufacturer of the "iron" performance, maybe I could be wrong, was MIPT . Computing, operating systems, application programs were to be manufactured at the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute .
At that time I was the responsible executor for the software and hardware complex for programming the robot.
The beginning of the project was promising, at the first stage a mobile platform was implemented in the form of two carriages on the landfill, approximately like that of the DAPR, only smaller. I, unfortunately, only once was when viewing the product.
In Tomsk, our electronics engineers implemented a 2-processor computer with 2-port memory. The memory was, like the processor: radiation-resistant and energy-independent, what we are now, after 25 years, have not yet been implemented in modern computers.
The head of this part of the project was N.G. Markov , now Doctor of Technical Sciences Professor of the Department of AVTF TPU.
The head of the entire project at NIIKP (I don’t remember his name) showed me from afar a radiation-resistant VM6 processor, even without giving it to my hands. Computer architecture was similar to dekovskoy.
The computer was duplicated - each trolley connected to each other had its own, independent copy of the computer. It was assumed that the robot will have a mass of sensors and sensors and the ability to move in conditions of strong radiation in the rubble of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
If the connection with the control center were lost, the robot would have to return to the base independently.
In the event of a hardware failure, the computer provided testing, overloading, and starting the OS from an available, full RAM location. For this, A. Smirnov (AVTF department) remade OSRT11SJ and made it multi-tasking, multiprocessing and relocatable (that is, it could start from any RAM address). In principle, there was nothing special to make it crawl along RAM even in the remaining holes. Now, of course, such things are done at the hardware level with the allocation of virtual addresses with fixed addresses and a single address space. But at that time it would be more difficult on that current element base. Although redoing the code in assembler was also a daunting task - all the same, the source code was in assembler - thanks to the company DEC - in those days software was supplied with the source code.
My share also included writing a preprocessor for C, in order to teach programs to distribute tasks between 2 processors. In addition, one of the chips of the OS was the ability to roll back, with a crash and re-start, the OS and tasks from the last saved place.
About how the laptop is doing it now - closed - opened the lid - all tasks are running, as if they haven't stopped. To do this, C added the ability for each task to store intermediate data from which it could re-start.
The development was to be carried out on the IBM PC / AT at that time, and through the COM port, the debugged C code was already collected on the product.
Since this was the first stage, the matter did not go further, and this is why the USSR collapsed.
Chernobyl remained in Ukraine. The project has vanished into oblivion. A pity, because technically he had to be more able to withstand external conditions than moon rovers.
Why I called the heading Terminator - in the end, if someone tried to destroy it (and the first candidate was radiation) - he would surely resist death to the last living block, but the policy turned out to be stronger than the talent of Soviet engineers.
But few know that a similar project was launched in the USSR in 1990.
')
The main task is reconnaissance under conditions of strong radiation in the rubble of the Chernobyl NPP .
In those days, such projects were of a closed nature and they were given a high level of secrecy, so I can’t give exact dates for the start of development.
The main contractor was NIIKP , the manufacturer of the "iron" performance, maybe I could be wrong, was MIPT . Computing, operating systems, application programs were to be manufactured at the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute .
At that time I was the responsible executor for the software and hardware complex for programming the robot.
The beginning of the project was promising, at the first stage a mobile platform was implemented in the form of two carriages on the landfill, approximately like that of the DAPR, only smaller. I, unfortunately, only once was when viewing the product.
In Tomsk, our electronics engineers implemented a 2-processor computer with 2-port memory. The memory was, like the processor: radiation-resistant and energy-independent, what we are now, after 25 years, have not yet been implemented in modern computers.
The head of this part of the project was N.G. Markov , now Doctor of Technical Sciences Professor of the Department of AVTF TPU.
The head of the entire project at NIIKP (I don’t remember his name) showed me from afar a radiation-resistant VM6 processor, even without giving it to my hands. Computer architecture was similar to dekovskoy.
The computer was duplicated - each trolley connected to each other had its own, independent copy of the computer. It was assumed that the robot will have a mass of sensors and sensors and the ability to move in conditions of strong radiation in the rubble of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
If the connection with the control center were lost, the robot would have to return to the base independently.
In the event of a hardware failure, the computer provided testing, overloading, and starting the OS from an available, full RAM location. For this, A. Smirnov (AVTF department) remade OSRT11SJ and made it multi-tasking, multiprocessing and relocatable (that is, it could start from any RAM address). In principle, there was nothing special to make it crawl along RAM even in the remaining holes. Now, of course, such things are done at the hardware level with the allocation of virtual addresses with fixed addresses and a single address space. But at that time it would be more difficult on that current element base. Although redoing the code in assembler was also a daunting task - all the same, the source code was in assembler - thanks to the company DEC - in those days software was supplied with the source code.
My share also included writing a preprocessor for C, in order to teach programs to distribute tasks between 2 processors. In addition, one of the chips of the OS was the ability to roll back, with a crash and re-start, the OS and tasks from the last saved place.
About how the laptop is doing it now - closed - opened the lid - all tasks are running, as if they haven't stopped. To do this, C added the ability for each task to store intermediate data from which it could re-start.
The development was to be carried out on the IBM PC / AT at that time, and through the COM port, the debugged C code was already collected on the product.
Since this was the first stage, the matter did not go further, and this is why the USSR collapsed.
Chernobyl remained in Ukraine. The project has vanished into oblivion. A pity, because technically he had to be more able to withstand external conditions than moon rovers.
Why I called the heading Terminator - in the end, if someone tried to destroy it (and the first candidate was radiation) - he would surely resist death to the last living block, but the policy turned out to be stronger than the talent of Soviet engineers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/367335/
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