A Multi-Layer Distributed Development Environment for Mobile Robotics

Mobile robotic devices combining sensors, actuators, and computers are unique, complex devices which may be difficult to model from an abstract point of view. This paper presents a software development system which builds an abstraction of a robotic environment. This abstraction allows external software to interact with either a simulated robot and environment or to a real robot complete with sensors. The implementation is distributed across a network, and allows software to run on remote hardware thus taking advantage of any specialized hardware available on the network. This paper appears in the proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-3), Feb. 1993, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 542-550.