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Code reusability tools for programming mobile robots

This paper describes two initiatives aiming at improving code reusability for programming mobile robots: robotflow/flowdesigner, a data-flow programming environment; MARIE (mobile and autonomous robotics integration environment), a programming environment allowing multiple applications, programs and tools, to operate on one or multiple machines/OS and work together on a mobile robot implementation. Robotflow/flowdesigners objective is to provide a modular, graphical programming environment that would help visualize and understand what is really happening in the robots control loops, sensors, actuators, by using graphical probes. MARIE aims at avoiding making an exclusive choice on particular programming tools, making it possible to reuse code and applications.

Robotic Software Integration Using MARIE

This paper presents MARIE, a middleware framework oriented towards developing and integrating new and existing software for robotic systems. By using a generic communication framework, MARIE aims to create a flexible distributed component system that allows robotics developers to share software programs and algorithms, and design prototypes rapidly based on their own integration needs. The use of MARIE is illustrated with the design of a socially interactive autonomous mobile robot platform capable of map building, localization, navigation, tasks scheduling, sound source localization, tracking and separation, speech recognition and generation, visual tracking, message reading and graphical interaction using a touch screen interface.

Spartacus attending the 2005 AAAI conference

Spartacus is our robot entry in the 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Challenge, making a robot attend the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Designing robots that are capable of interacting with humans in real-life settings can be considered the ultimate challenge when it comes to intelligent autonomous systems. One key issue is the integration of multiple modalities (e.g., mobility, physical structure, navigation, vision, audition, dialogue, reasoning). Such integration increases the diversity and also the complexity of interactions the robot can generate. It also makes it difficult to monitor how such increased capabilities are used in unconstrained conditions, whether it is done while the robot is in operation of afterwards. This paper reports solutions and findings resulting from our hardware, software and decisional integration work on Spartacus. It also outlines perspectives in making intelligent and interaction capabilities evolve for autonomous robots.

Modularity and integration in the design of a socially interactive robot

Designing robots that are capable of interacting with humans in real life settings is a challenging task. One key issue is the integration of multiple modalities (e.g., mobility, physical structure, navigation, vision, audition, dialogue, reasoning) into a coherent framework. Taking the AAAI mobile robot challenge (making a robot attend the national conference on artificial intelligence) as the experimental context, we are currently addressing hardware, software and computation integration issues involved in designing a robot capable of sophisticated interaction with humans. This paper reports on our design solutions and the current status of the work, along with the potential impacts this design on human-robot interaction research.

Trends in Component-Based Robotics

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is an approach that has arisen in the software engineering community in the last decade. It aims to shift the emphasis in system-building from traditional programming to composing software systems from a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom-built components [Cas00, HC01, Szy02, DW98, CC01]. Component-Based Software Engineering is said to be primarily concerned with three functions [HC01]: 1. Developing software from pre-produced parts 2. The ability to reuse those parts in other applications 3. Easily maintaining and customizing those parts to produce new functions and features

Using MARIE for Mobile Robot Component Development and Integration

Many existing programming environments, such as those documented in this book, are all proposing different approaches for mobile robotics system development and integration. Most of them are incompatible with each other for different reasons [OC03], such as the use of specific communication protocols and/or mechanisms, different operating systems, robotics platforms, architectural concepts, programming languages, intended purpose, proprietary source codes, etc. This leads to code replication of common functionalities across different programming environments, and to specific functionalities being often restricted to one programming environment.