Christian L. Jacobsen

Towards concrete concurrency: occam-pi on the LEGO mindstorms

In a world of ad-hoc networks, highly interconnected mobile devices and increasingly large supercomputer clusters, students need models of computation that help them think about dynamic and concurrent systems. Many of the tools currently available for introducing students to concurrency are difficult to use and are not intrinsically motivating. To provide an authentic, hands-on, and enjoyable introduction to concurrency, we have ported occam π, a language whose expressive powers are especially compelling for describing communicating dynamic reactive processes, to the LEGO Mindstorms.

Safe parallelism for robotic control

During the Spring 2008 semester at Olin College, we introduced the programming language occam-pi to undergraduates as part of their first course in robotics. Students were able to explore image processing and autonomous behavioral control in a parallel programming language on a small mobile robotics platform with just two weeks of tutorial instruction. Our experiences to date suggest that the language and tools we have developed allow the concise expression of complex robotic control systems, and enable the integration of events from the environment in a consistent and safe model for parallel control that is directly expressed in software.