Design Principles for a Universal Robotic Software Platform and Application to URBI

 

The number of generic robots available today on the market is increasing significantly. While this represents a great opportunity to carry on research using advanced robotic devices, including humanoid robots, there is still a serious limitation: all these robots are totally incompatible in term of software, and they are generally quite hard to program, lacking the proper abstractions and properties needed in robotics. We will present here a discussion on possible design rules for such a universal software platform and review a few already existing platforms with these criteria in mind. We will also introduce the URBI platform which is the result of our effort in an attempt to design a universal platform and component architecture following these guidelines.