Work in Progress: Enabling robot device discovery through robot device descriptions
This addresses the issue of software integration inefficiencies for robotics researchers and developers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing firmware and frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of device driver proliferation when adapting software components to new robots by proposing the Robot Device Interface Specification (RDIS), a domain-specific language that enables automatic interface generation and resource discovery, demonstrated by linking differential drive robots to HTML5 and ROS.
There is no dearth of new robots that provide both generalized and customized platforms for learning and research. Unfortunately as we attempt to adapt existing software components, we are faced with an explosion of device drivers that interface each hardware platform with existing frameworks. We certainly gain the efficiencies of reusing algorithms and tools developed across platforms but only once the device driver is created. We propose a domain specific language that describes the development and runtime interface of a robot and defines its link to existing frameworks. The Robot Device Interface Specification (RDIS) takes advantage of the internal firmware present on many existing devices by defining the communication mechanism, syntax and semantics in such a way to enable the generation of automatic interface links and resource discovery. We present the current domain model as it relates to differential drive robots as a mechanism to use the RDIS to link described robots to HTML5 via web sockets and ROS (Robot Operating System).