Functional Reactive Program Translator for Controlling Robot Systems

Abstract

FRP (functional reactive programming) is a domain- specific sub-language embedded in Haskell. FRP is developed based on the arrow types and suitable for programming reactive systems such as robot systems. An essential higher-order type, namely signal, provides higher levels of abstractions of reactive systems. However, FRP can not be directly applicable to most robot systems since it is implemented on top of a heavy language Haskell. To overcome this limitation, RT-FRP (real-time functional reactive programming) was proposed, but any practical implementation of RT-FRP has not been proposed currently. In this paper, RT-FRP is implemented as a form of C translator. The proposed translator converts RT-FRP programs into C programs. To measure the effectiveness of the RT-FRP translator, some robot control programs are developed, translated, and loaded on top of LEGO MindStorm. According to the experimental result, the reactive logic can be coded more concisely using RT-FRP than C although the size of the binary code is somewhat increased.