A Visual and Portable Tool for Robot Programming

Programming software for complex robotic systems requires powerful tools that allow the programmers to focus on the functionality of their application without getting lost in low-level details (communication software, operating systems, etc), while guaranteeing robustness, flexibility, and efficiency. In previous works a software integrating system called NEXUS was presented that achieves these characteristics. This paper presents a visual programming tool called BABEL that fulfills the NEXUS specifications and in addition exhibits multilanguage and multidistribution features. It decouples the OS, communication network, and hardware-dependent parts of the modules of the application from their intended functionality. Copyright (c) 2002 IFAC.