Toward a Robot-Independent Programming Framework

Posted 19 Jun 2007 at 20:11 UTC by steve

The USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems published an interesting dissertation by Evan Drumwright titled "The Task Matrix: A Robot-Independent Framework for Programming Humanoids" (PDF format). In the paper, Drumwright attempts to separate humanoid robot tasks into robot-dependent and robot-independent tasks. The goal is to improve software reuse by identifying a primitive task set for humanoids that allow a broad range of higher level tasks. He also provides an example of an XML posture description language. For more, see Drumwright's Task Matrix webpage, which includes videos of simulated robots expressing various postures and movements.

Another effort along the same lines..., posted 20 Jun 2007 at 10:38 UTC by mwaibel » (Master)

... is made by a recent spin-off at Edinburgh University, called Edinburgh Robotics. Their application suite DevBot is built on a custom made embedded operating system (DevBot OS) supporting a wide range of hardware. It is built on a real-time capable Linux 2.6 kernel, which should guarantee easy integration with open-source software.

Does anybody have any experience with this platform?

Other Robot-Independent Programing Frameworks, posted 21 Jun 2007 at 03:25 UTC by Daniel Casner » (Journeyer)

Pyro is an excellent Python based framework which separates robot dependent and independent aspects of code in "Robot" objects and "Brain" objects. I have for instance, run the same code on an AIBO, a Mindstorms RCX and a simulated robot all with very different characteristics.

Microsoft is also making some effort in their Robotics Studio to allow for robot-robot independent programming. I can't personally evaluate how well it abstracts robot details having only briefly experimented with it but it is partially derived from Pyro.