Work in Progress: Enabling robot device discovery through robot device descriptions

There is no dearth of new robots that provide both generalized and customized platforms for learning and research. Unfortunately as we attempt to adapt existing software components, we are faced with an explosion of device drivers that interface each hardware platform with existing frameworks. We certainly gain the efficiencies of reusing algorithms and tools developed across platforms but only once the device driver is created. We propose a domain specific language that describes the development and runtime interface of a robot and defines its link to existing frameworks. The Robot Device Interface Specification (RDIS) takes advantage of the internal firmware present on many existing devices by defining the communication mechanism, syntax and semantics in such a way to enable the generation of automatic interface links and resource discovery. We present the current domain model as it relates to differential drive robots as a mechanism to use the RDIS to link described robots to HTML5 via web sockets and ROS (Robot Operating System).

[1]  Herman Bruyninckx Towards a Common Robotics , Automation and Manufacturing Operating System ( CRAMOS ) , 2007 .

[2]  Randy Pausch,et al.  Alice: a 3-D tool for introductory programming concepts , 2000 .

[3]  Charles Consel,et al.  Domain-Specific Languages: From Design to Implementation Application to Video Device Drivers Generation , 1999, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[4]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Most valuable player: a robot device server for distributed control , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[5]  James E. Davis,et al.  Alice and robotics in introductory CS courses , 2009, TAPIA '09.

[6]  Jean-Christophe Baillie,et al.  URBI: towards a universal robotic low-level programming language , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[8]  John Lapham RobotScript™: the introduction of a universal robot programming language , 1999 .