Towards Interactive, Incremental Programming of ROS Nodes
This addresses the challenge for robotics developers by offering an incremental tool to facilitate experimentation in robot programming.
The paper tackles the complexity of robot software development by proposing an internal DSL for interactively creating and reshaping ROS nodes, enabling dynamic control via the Python command line interface.
Writing software for controlling robots is a complex task, usually demanding command of many programming languages and requiring significant experimentation. We believe that a bottom-up development process that complements traditional component- and MDSD-based approaches can facilitate experimentation. We propose the use of an internal DSL providing both a tool to interactively create ROS nodes and a behaviour-replacement mechanism to interactively reshape existing ROS nodes by wrapping the external interfaces (the publish/subscribe topics), dynamically controlled using the Python command line interface.