Design And Implementation Of Visual Development Platform For Robotic Applications

With the widely use of robot in the areas of healthcare, education, service and entertainment, the importance of the development platform for robotic applications is being increasingly highlighted. At present, most of development platforms for robotic applications are text-based. This development method is of big difficulties, of low reuse rate, of long development cycle and of high error rate, which is not conducive to its promotion and application. Compared to text-based programming, visual programming is characterized by simpilicity, intuition high reuse rate, short development cycle, low error rate and others. It is helpful to simplify the development of robotic applications. Since the 21 st century, domestic and foreign researchers have paid more and more attention to the visual programming for robotic applications.This issue is about the visual development platform for robotic applications and contains two core topics. One is robotic visual programming language, and the other is the automatic code generation algorithm based on the robotic visual programming language. Based on the analysis of these two topics, the platform can be divided into three parts, including the visual language for robot control, the subsystem of editing robotic visual program and subsystems of compiling it.Based on the analysis of a variety of visual language models, the data-flow model is chosen as the basis of visual programming language finally. The data-flow model has its own features, such as intuition, concurrency and flowchart.Therefore, it is more suitable for describing the robotic applications. Because of its data-driven feature, the data-flow visual language has some difficulties to process controlled flow. This issue has proposed some improvements for traditional data-flow visual language, and the enhanced data-flow visual language is abbreviated as EDVL(Enhanced Dataflow Visual Language). The main contribution of this issue includes three aspects which are as follows:1. Sequence, branch and loop control structures are extended to the traditional data-flow visual language. A formal description method is proposed to describe the enhanced data-flow visual language.2. Based on the enhanced data-flow visual language, automatic code generation algorithm for generating C code from visual program has been improved. The topological relations and the object-oriented nature of icon controls are taken into account in the code generation algorithm.3. A visual development platform for robotic applications is designed and implemented for this issue. A humanoid robot which is based on ARM controller is chosen to be the hardware environment for experiment. Compared to the text-based language development platform, the efficiency of visual development platform is significantly improved for developing some certain specific applications.