Abstract
Visual domain-specific languages usually have low entry barrier. Sometimes even children can program on such languages by working with visual representations. This is widely used in educational robotics domain, where most commonly used programming environments are visual. The paper describes a novel dataflow visual programming environment for embedded robotic platforms. Obviously, complex dataflow languages are not simple for understanding. The purpose of our tool is to "bridge" between lightweight educational robotic programming tools (commonly these tools provide languages which are based on control flow model) and complex industrial tools (which provide languages based on more complex dataflow execution model). We compare programming environments mostly used by robotics community with our tool. After brief review of behavioural robotic architectures, some thoughts on expressing them in terms of our dataflow language are given. Visual language, which is described here, provides opportunity to mix dataflow and control flow models for robotics programming. We believe that it is important for educational purposes. Program on our language consists of different blocks (visual representation of data transformation processes) and "links" which presents data flow between them. Domain-specific modelling approach was used to develop our language. Also, this paper provides the examples of solving two typical robot control tasks in our language.
Highlights
Programming languages for creating robotic controllers are actual topics of research oftenly discussed at major conferences, such as ICRA1 or IROS2
Many researchers denoted the convenience of dataflow visual programming languages (DFVPLs) [6], finding them more useful than textual dataflow languages (DFLs), for example because data flows explicitly displayed on the diagram
We presented the prototype of dataflow language for programming different robotic kits (LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, TRIK)
Summary
Programming languages for creating robotic controllers are actual topics of research oftenly discussed at major conferences, such as ICRA1 or IROS2. Robotic VPLs are commonly used for educational purposes, making possible for students of even junior schools to create robotic programs. For these aims there are already exists a great number of educational robotic programming environments based on VPLs, e.g. NXTG4, TRIK Studio, ROBOLAB6, there are some academic tools implementing interesting and novel approaches to educational robotics programming [1], [3], [5]. Robotic control programs are inherently reactive: they transform data which is continuously coming from multiple sensors into the impulses on actuators For this reason dataflow languages (DFLs) are well-suitable for robotics programming. This paper discusses a novel extensible tool for programming all popular educational robotic kits on dataflow visual programming language. The last section concludes the paper and discusses possible directions for future work
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