I am currently developing a planning system that I wish to communicate
with a remote system using a series of commands that make up the
plan. My Planner is run using Austin Kyote Common Lisp and runs
in the interpreter (not compiled).
The method that my associates and I have proposed involves
the use of unix sockets, currently it appears as if I will have
to establish a connection for every command I send to the remote
system, for example if I wish the send a command that tells
a robot to grasp a cube I will have to establish the socket,
send the string representation of the command, accept the result
of the command, and close the socket. While this may seem to be
inefficient for every primitive (10 times for one move of a cube),
it still beats the old way. The reason I can't simply establish
the socket once, is that it appears as if a process must be attached
to the socket at all times, otherwise the connection is dropped.
Since I have not found a way to establish a stream directly from
LISP to the socket, I am forced to use the SYSTEM command to call
a C function whenever communication between the two systems is
needed. So I am essentially creating a short lived process every
time I communicate. The most intuitive solution would be to
establish a stream between LISP and the socket, but I haven't found
an obvious way of achieving this. Please respond via email, if the
interest and/or response is great enough I will post results.
Thanks,
Brian D. Stark
email: ·····@saturn.sdsu.edu
Voice: (619)296-5229
address:
5822 Lauretta St.
San Diego, CA 92110