Programming platform for distributed robotics: primitives and portability

Abstract

The Stabilizing Robotics Language (StarL) programming framework aims to simplify development of distributed robotic applications by providing programming abstractions and building blocks for communication, motion control and coordination between robots. It has been used to develop applications such as formation control, automatic intersection protocol, and distributed collaborative search. In this thesis, we introduce the programming abstractions as StarL primitives that are platform independent and useful across hardware platforms, resulting in portability. We first introduce the primitives as building blocks to easily develop, simulate and debug distributed robotic applications in StarL. Then, we discuss the design of the StarL framework which enables us to achieve portability of robot programs across hardware platforms. Thus, the same application program, say, for formation control, can now be ported and deployed on multiple, heterogeneous robotic platforms. We evaluate the design of these new features by simulating several applications.