The ORCCAD programming environment for robotic systems allows users to address automatic control laws in continuous time at the lower levels, and aspects of discrete-time logic at the higher lev els. ORCCAD provides tools of specification, formal verification, simulation, and real-time code generation integrated within a set of dedicated graphical interfaces. Basic robot actions, which are in trinsically hybrid entities, are handled by the ROBOT-TASK struc ture, which smartly interfaces aspects of continuous and discrete time. ROBOT-TASKS are further logically composed into more complex actions, ROBOT-PROCEDURES, through a dedicated lan guage. While system performance can be checked using simula tions, crucial properties such as deadlock avoidance, safety, and liveness can be formally verified at both levels. The approach is illustrated with an underwater inspection mission.
A global federation of experimental facilities in computer networking is being built on the basis of a thin waist, the Slice-based Federation Architecture (SFA), for managing testbed resources in a secure and efficient way. Its success will depend on the existence of tools that allow testbeds to expose their local resources and users to browse and select the resources most appropriate for their experiments. This paper presents two such tools. First, SFAWrap, which makes it relatively easy for a testbed owner to provide an SFA interface for their testbed. Second, MySlice, a tool that allows experimenters to browse and reserve testbed resources via SFA, and that is extensible through a system of plug-ins. Together, these tools should lower the barriers to entry for testbed owners who wish to join the global federation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.