LEARNING OUTCOMES

The goal of the course is to give the students the fundamentals of POSIX programming, concurrent programming, and inter-process communication (i.e., interrupts, signals, pipes, threads, semaphores, shared memory, sockets, publish/subscribe methods).

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Following the Bloom's taxonomy, the student will achieve the following results (levels 2 to 4):
• Describe the behaviour of the different communication / synchronization primitives between tasks and processes (events, shared memory, messages) both in a single and in networked machines.
• Apply state-of-practice concurrent / distribute programming schemes to solve reference problems in robotics.
• Compare different communication / synchronization primitives in solving common robotic problems, and
• Motivate the selection of the most suitable for a specific process.
• Design and test concurrent / distributed programmes to solve standard, complex, relevant cases in robotics.
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PREREQUISITES

1. Programming in C Language (advanced concepts)
2. Basic structure of an Operating System's kernel
3. Basic networking concepts

TEACHING METHODS

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

The course is composed by 12 modules, one per week.

1. Course intro
2. Op sys architecture 1
3. Op sys architecture 2
4. SysCalls1: processes
5. SysCalls2: threads
6. SysCalls3: mutual exclusion, synchronization
7. SysCalls4: pipes
8. SysCalls5: non determinism
9. SysCalls6: events
10. SysCalls7: sockets
11. Publish/Subscribe: D-BUS
12. Real cases analysis

Each module includes an assignment whose solution is discussed in a successive module. The reference framework is the POSIX standard. 

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

The whole study material (reference textbooks, slides, examples) is available in the AulaWeb portal.