Considering a "Robot Operating System" built on communicating Due's

Official Hardware Mega Due
1

Hello Arduino Forum
I teach electronics in Thisted Danmark. I am considering a "Robot Operating System" built on communication Due's. I see Due comes with a number of serial ports.

I think of letting Due 1 take care of hearing and sight
Due 2 and 3 for sensing and motor control in Left and Right arm and hand respectively
Due 4 and 5: Same for legs, responsible for walking

I would prefer these 5 Due to communicate in a star so all Due's communicate to all - if possible.
If I can only get 4 I will have to make do with that.

So the Robotic Operating System should take care of calls from one Due to another.

It's possible that placing a Raspberry Pi centrally would replace the whole thing but I have been playing with the idea for many years now that concurrent processes could preferably be placed on separate processors. It makes sense to me at least..

I hope that understanding the task of the individual Due becomes easier in a star configuration where all can - and do - talk to all.

It would be interesting to try to make the thing robust so it would try and move on even if one or several Due's stopped responding...But that will probably be too much to begin with!

So: Has anyone had up to 5 Due's communicating via the serial ports? I am interested to hear your viewpoints? Maybe all 5 should rather be on a SPI bus? or a i2C bus?

2

Raspberry PI 4 cores running at 900MH
Due 1 core at 87 MH

Are you really gaining anything splitting up the processes on different boards especially if they end up coordinating back to a central process? Has the hardware development over the past couple years obsoleted your original premise? Two PI's sharing the load but each able to take over the whole process seems to be a better goal. You have single point of failure with the star design.