A Study of Context-Oriented Programming for Applying to Robot Development

Abstract

Next generation robot is expected to provide multi-purpose services depending on surrounding environments. Currently, many of robots would support a limited services, since it is difficult to solve the cross-cutting concerns in those complex services. Additionally, after the launch of robot products, it requires to support additional extended services that would depend on the real environment, even if the hardware environment would be the same. We believe that the essential idea of Contextoriented programming (COP) could help these difficulties. To achieve our final goal, which is to develop a multi-purpose services robot, there are some discussions needed for the current COP languages to satisfy the multi-purpose service robot requirements. In this paper, firstly we introduce the background of our proposal that the current robotics problems and future vision, then a case study of a tunnel rescue robot that will make clear to our goal for robot development based on COP. Finally, to achieve this goal we present a novel architecture. The proposed architecture will satisfy the requirements of the future robot.

Plam

“…As described in Section 1, the following points need to be considered when importing COP into an embedded system: (1) The layer activation should be synchronized with the hardware startup. (2) During the layer activation, if an abnormal context is encountered, the layer activation should be stopped immediately, following which the activation of the exception handling layer should be started immediately.…”

“…Regarding (1), because the embedded system and hardware have a relatively direct connection, and the COP layer can carry the hardware management in the embedded system, when importing COP into the embedded system, it is necessary to consider the connection between the layer and hardware. As the startup process for different components in an embedded system is time consuming, the COP layer activation is not supposed to be completed in an instant.…”

“…In this case, to protect the embedded device, the system should switch to the abnormal state processing mode as soon as possible, rather than continue the activation work before running; otherwise, the device operation may be harmed. For example, in a rescue robot model based on COP [1], the device can be switched between the ground and flight modes. The switching process requires the robot to climb to a certain height before it executes the flight mode.…”