Robot behavior engineering using DD-Designer

Abstract

We present a robotic software development framework for rapid simulation and programming of mobile robot teams. The framework uses a specification-centred generative approach. A robot control program is specified in an intuitive graphical representation of a hyper-graph of typed data processing elements. This specification is automatically refined to all design artifacts required in a robotic software development environment: simulation models, robot control programs, team communication infrastructure, documentation, and real-time monitoring. Although our framework was originally intended to design behavior-based robot control programs using the dual dynamics architecture, we demonstrate the flexibility of the environment by an example which integrates a "classical" control schema into a dual dynamics behavior system. Experimental validation was done on GMD-Robots, our team of mid-size league RoboCup robots.