Re: Re: Orocos meeting: design presentation?

Dear Herman,

I am very interested in giving a short presentation of the "SmartSoft" framework
and the design principles / architecture behind it at the OROCOS meeting.

To give you an impression of the topics I would like to talk about, I would
suggest to make a single 20 min talk out of the following two talks. Of course, I
would focus on OROCOS objectives like module configuration and communication
patterns etc.

Christian

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Building Autonomous Systems: A Software Engineering Challenge
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Building complex sensorimotor systems like service robots not
only requires highly sophisticated approaches for sensing the
environment and for navigating in dynamic environments. It is
moreover increasingly important to reliably handle the complexity
of the overall software of such a system.

Although these days many impressive implementations of different
kinds of robots are available, their software design principles
are more or less not accessible and the whole system forms a work
of art.

Faced with this problem we decided to specify and implement a
software framework which is specifically tailored to the needs
of sensorimotor systems.

In my talk I will not only describe our software framework
"SmartSoft" and give an overview on existing systems. I will
furthermore explain what we thought is important in such a
framework. I will describe the concepts and the implementation
of "SmartSoft" and will give a retrospection on our design
decisions. This includes experiences on how to organize the
distributed development of a complex sensorimotor system.


2: Multilayer Architectures for Autonomous Systems: Connecting the Layers
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Although multilayer architectures are well-etablished for building
complex sensorimotor systems, only few attention has been paid to the
aspect of how to glue the different layers. Often one assumes that
focussing on one layer only is sufficient and merging everything
to form a complete system is just "doing".

I will describe our multilayer architecture used to implement
sensorimotor systems. I will in particular focus on the interaction
of the different layers and will explain how task execution, task
planning and primitive skills interact with each other.

Merging the different layers of a multilayer architecture is not
only an aspect of system design, but also requires an appropriate
supporting software structure. I will in particular focus on the
relationship between the system architecture and their respective
equivalents at the module level and at the level of the underlying
software framework.

I will close my talk with showing a video tape to give an
impression of the capabilities of our demonstrator which is
a RWI B21 platform.


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Christian Schlegel
FAW Ulm (Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing)
PO Box 2060
D-89010 Ulm
Germany

Tel. : ++49 (731) 501 8949
Fax  : ++49 (731) 501 999
email: [email protected]
WWW  : http://www.faw.uni-ulm.de/
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