Abstract
Developing robotics applications is a demanding software engineering challenge. Such a software has to perform multiple cooperating tasks in a well-coordinated manner in order to avoid unsatisfactory behavior. In this paper, we define an approach for developing robot software based on the integration of the programming language X-Klaim and the popular robotics framework ROS. X-Klaim is a programming language specifically devised to design distributed applications consisting of software components interacting through multiple distributed tuple spaces. Advantages of using X-Klaim in the robotics domain derive from its high abstraction level, that allows developers to focus on robots’ behavior, and from its computation and communication model, which is especially suitable for dealing with the distributed nature of robots’ architecture. We show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach by implementing a scenario involving a robot looking for potential victims in a disaster area.
The work was supported by the PRIN project “SEDUCE” n. 2017TWRCNB.
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Notes
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For the sake of presentation, we omit from the description of Klaim nodes the distinction between physical and logical localities and, hence, the so called allocation environment. The latter is a component of a node that acts as a name solver binding logical localities, occurring in the processes hosted in the node, to specific physical localities.
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Code completion is provided in the X-Klaim Eclipse editor for imports as well as standard “Organize imports” mechanisms.
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Jetty 9: https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/.
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This interaction is denoted in Fig. 5 by a white arrow, to stress its optionality.
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We ‘consume’ java_rosbridge and X-Klaim runtime libraries as Maven artifacts.
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Non-blocking versions of in and read are also available: in_nb and read_nb, respectively.
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Bettini, L., Bourr, K., Pugliese, R., Tiezzi, F. (2020). Writing Robotics Applications with X-Klaim. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Engineering Principles. ISoLA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12477. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61470-6_22
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