You might be surprised at the lack of speed required to control robots. I've done a lot of robotics work for semiconductor fab tools (in Smalltalk, not Perl, but the same ideas would work for Perl). Many semiconductor robots have serial port inputs with relatively high-level command sets. Like, for instance, go to pre-taught position#1. This doesn't take too much speed, as long as the next command comes pretty soon afterwards. Remember that motions in the real world often take in excess of a second to perform; even Perl can keep up with this! Likewise for robotic welding (I've programmed multi-axis TIG welding robots before too); a typical general-purpose multi-axis robot will also take a high-level command over a serial port.

What's described here is a layer below that, where the coordinate transforms are being done in Perl, and the various motors are being controlled by a separate motion controller (you have synchronization issues whenever you have to control multiple motors at the same time: if you don't stop and start them at the same time, your motion path gets pretty wierd).

But Perl can even work for lower-level systems (though you may need to use Inline to talk to the hardware registers). For instance, there are ISA-bus motion controller cards that use motor controller chips like the LM629. You just tell these chips how you want the motor to run, and then you tell all the chips to start up simultaneously.

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