A network of concurrent microcomputers for closed loop interactions
Douglas Leonard Bray · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1982
The following thesis is one of the leading contributions in microcomputer network design from a cybernetic viewpoint. This novel research transcends the conventional, "efficient" use of microcomputers and explores the network of microcomputers per seas the new entity. Concepts such as organizational closure and autopoiesis are hinted at from this perspective. Cognition can now be studied under a new light with a set of concurrent microcomputers that approaches the structure and function of a nervous system. Furthermore, the present thesis shows how a set of independent microcomputers can both: interact among each other and, as a network, interact with its environment. Although the use of a multiprocessor architecture in the field of robotics -and elsewhere is not new, the network of microcomputers presented here offers an illuminating answer to the problem of handling the increasing number of microcomputers involved, as well as a new, radical approach to robotics and other fields of enormous potential.