Demo abstract: ROSLab — A modular programming environment for robotic applications

摘要

In recent years we have witnessed an increase in the use of robots for different applications spanning from military to civilian operations. The robotics community has been very active in creating algorithms and theories to optimally navigate single and multiple agents in complex environments. While this growth in capabilities makes robotics more suitable and attractive for everyday applications, experiments becomes more and more complex and time consuming. Currently, roboticists need to have a deep knowledge of programming languages such as C, C++, Java, and Python, to name few popular ones, that are often not intuitive and easy to understand and implement, especially for beginner users target of this research. To overcame this limitation, we propose a simplified high-level programming language based on blocks and links dragged on a workspace which generates the skeleton code for robotic applications involving different types of robots, as displayed in Fig. 1. In order to develop such a high-level programming language that still can guarantee flexibility in term of implementation, our approach takes advantage of the Robot Operating System (ROS) [1]. ROS is a open source meta-operating system that provides a message passing structure between different processes (or nodes) across a network (inter-process communication). In our framework, we consider a hierarchical approach in which at the base there is ROS that allows inter-process communication between nodes in a robot and on the top we create a high-level language that interacts with ROS and thus with the real robot. The high-level language can be viewed as an extra layer added to simplify lower level code generation.