| In this thesis, we explore Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) as a framework for robot programming and specifying hybrid systems. We present a dialect of the FRP-based domain-specific language Functional Robotics (Frob) in the latest FRP implementation. Frob enables development of modular, reusable, and flexible robot software in a declarative style. To see how Frob fits in the big picture of robot programming and test its capabilities, we present a comparative review of the recent robot languages and Frob. Additionally, we present a visual tracking-based robot navigation system, a complex real-world application, developed in Frob and show how different domains like robot programming, vision, and user interfaces can be seamlessly integrated into the FRP framework. From a more formal point of view, we also look at the relationship between FRP and hybrid systems. We show how any given formal hybrid system specification can be expressed in Frob. A subset of FRP is defined as a grammer and a syntactic translation procedure is given to convert FRP programs in this grammer to a faithful hybrid system specification. |
