Author:

Keywords:

Robotics, Domain Specific Language, Real-time

Abstract:

From the beginning the OROCOS Real-Time Toolkit has offered support for dynamically loadable, hard real-time safe scripting and state machines. Users often consider these mechanism as key features because they provide the ability to perform dynamic and even interactive changes to the system by means of a language which is much simpler and more robust than the C++ language of the host system. In spite of this some shortcomings of the current implementation have become evident: Firstly there is a need for a more expressive state machine model which adheres to well-known semantics. Secondly the cost to maintain and evolve an own scripting and state machine language is high. At last portability of scripts and state machines is limited as the scripting implementation is inherently tied to the RTT framework. This paper describes our approach to overcome these issues by creating a Lua based execution environment for constructing real-time safe robotic domain specific languages. We illustrates its application by describing a hierarchical Statechart model used for coordination in the robotics domain.