Architecture of an Extensible Visual Programming Environment for Authoring Behaviour of Personal Service Robots

Abstract

Programming tasks on personal service robots in multi-disciplinary teams is challenging. The goal of this research is to enable roboticists and non-programmer domain experts to co-develop robot service scenarios in real world environments using a visual programming environment called RoboStudio. The first key contribution of this paper is presenting the implementation architecture of RoboStudio. This is important as it serves as a case study for smaller teams with limited resources to expedite the process of building visual programming environments without the deep knowledge of frameworks and meta-modelling tools required for building complex visual environments. The second key contribution presents the model and design of components for parsing, generating, validating and visualising the RBDL. The third contribution elicits how we evaluated RoboStudio's design and functionality through code-generation of scripts for several service applications deployed in the real world on the University of Auckland's Healthbot. We also show RoboStudio's extensibility by building other visual languages on this platform.