CoolBot: a component-oriented programming framework for robotics

Abstract

This paper introduces at the specification level CoolBOT, a component-oriented programming framework for robotics designed to assist robotic system developers in obtaining more structured and reusable systems without imposing any specific architecture. Within this framework components are conceived as Port Automata (PA)[13] that interact through their ports and that can be composed to build up new components from existing ones. Components, no matter if they are atomic or compound, are internally modeled as Discrete Event Systems and controlled using the same state control graph. CoolBOT hides the programmer any aspects related to communications and provides standard mechanisms for different modes of data exchange between components, exception handling and support for distributed computing environments.