Integrated Robotic Programming Environment

One of the difficulties facing robotic research and development is the dearth of integrated toolsets for facilitating robot programming. A wide variety of individual tools exist, but the developer must manage them all independently of their actual development environment. The goal is to extend a programming IDE to include integrated robot programming tools in much the same way as most IDEs include an integrated code debugger.

Robots have become increasingly complex and their controller increasingly powerful, yet robotic programming tools have not advanced as rapidly. Robots must be programmed both at the development stage to create the functionality of the robot, and in the field to customize the robot to applications, environment and tasks. It is important that robots become easier to program do that their potential may be fully realized.

Robot researchers face difficulties developing software systems for robots that are to assist humans in everyday environments. Much of the software is proprietary, there is a lack of open standards to promote collaboration and code reuse, and there is a lack of techniques for bringing the human in to the robot’s perceived environment.

The difficulty is the complex interactions robots have in real environment including:
• A large number of devices for input, output and storage.
• Simultaneous and unrelated activity on many inputs and outputs.
• The requirement to operate in real-time.
• Unexpected real world conditions.
• Wide variations in hardware and interfaces.