A Programming Environment for Sensor-Controlled Robots

This paper gives an overview of the research activities in robotics at the Electronics Laboratory of the State University of Ghent over the last few years. Two themes emerge, namely (i) the use of concurrent high-level programming languages to implement the hard real-time control functions needed for sensor driven and compliant motion; and (ii) the need for interactive graphical simulation and programming environments for sensor-equipped robots. With respect to the first theme, we describe the implementation of compliant motion on a Modula-2 based multiprocessor. Regarding the second theme, we observe that environments for programming a robot have been developed ever since robots have existed. These environments have evolved from simple teach-by-doing procedures towards implicit task-level programming and simulation systems. Although some of these complex systems are commercially available, most of them are not extendable and so researchers cannot use them for experiments and testing new ideas. Smalltalk should prove quite a suitable tool in solving this problem [15,20]. Based on two concrete developments in Smalltalk, we discuss the appropriateness of this language to implement graphical-robot-programming environments.