Authoring and execution environments for multimedia applications featuring robotic actors

Recent advances in multimedia systems and robotics encourage the development of novel types of applications that associate the use of various multimedia objects with the behavior of multiple robotic actors. Unfortunately, the development of such systems is hampered by the lack of appropriate authoring and execution environments. This paper seeks to fill this gap by describing CHOROS, a Java-based authoring environment for visually planning the behavior of multiple robotic actors and linking it with the rendering state of various multimedia objects. This is accomplished with an augmented reality interface in which the author draws the robot paths and associates them with timelines describing the use of various multimedia objects. During the actual execution of the application the environment automatically tracks and adjusts the behavior of the robotic actors in order to maintain its association with the rendering state of the multimedia objects.