Speaker: Johan Fabry Abstract: When thinking about robotics, the first thing that comes to mind is impressive hardware. The main problems to solve here are difficulties in building it and managing its low level functionalities, e.g. making a robot that can walk. But the robot only starts to do interesting things when you build on top of these functionalities, e.g. make it walk to a door and open it. This is almost purely a software challenge and sadly roboticists are stuck in the nineties when it comes to software development. They have an incredibly static way of programming robot behaviors. In our research we are pushing towards the total oposite: live programming of a robot, while it is running. In this talk I will present our language, called Live Robot Programming (LRP), built on Pharo and making heavy use of Roassal for visualizations. I will show how LRP allows for the creation and evolution of robotic behaviors on-the-fly and how you can use it to play with robots. I will demonstrate LRP with a simple robot behavior, and on a real robot if I can get it to board the plane with me. Video1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CYMkxV919s Video2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPQXeE9yJPI

1. Live Robot
Programming
Johan Fabry,
Miguel Campusano, Pablo Estefó
Pleiad & RyCh labs
Computer Science Department (DCC)
Universidad de Chile

2. Two small stories

5. Software is
fundamental
5

7. Good Software
is fundamental
7

8. Software Engineering
8
Time
=
Money

9. Software Engineering
9
Time
=
Research

10. Software Engineering
10
Time
=
Brainpower

11. Software Engineering
11
Brainpower =
Problem complexity +
Technology complexity

12. What do we want?

13. Waste less time in
incidental complexity
13
Use time on
fundamental complexity

14. “But why is the robot executing this behavior now?”
Example
14
“What would happen if I change epsilon to 5 ?”
(What is the internal state of the algorithm)
(What are the correct parameters for the algorithm)

15. Spend brainpower on the
complexity of the task
15
Have an immediate
connection to the
behavior

16. Live Programming

17. Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (CUSEC 2012)

18. Immediate Connection
18

19. Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (CUSEC 2012)

20. Immediate Connection
20

21. Live Robot
Programming

22. Fundamentals
• Live Programming Language
• For the behavior layer of robots
• Nested State Machines
22

23. Machines, States
23

24. Immediate Connection
24

25. Variables, Actions
25
Demo time!

26. Immediate Connection
26

27. More about the language
in the paper
on the website.
http://pleiad.cl/LRP

28. 28
Conclusions
• Live Robot Programming: Yes you can!
• State machines are resilient
• Experience: radical speedup

29. Immediate Connection
29

30. Future Work
• Refactorings to avoid restarts
• Test expressibility of the language
• Modularity and reuse of behaviors

31. http://pleiad.cl/LRP

32. Active State
32

33. Active State
33

34. Immediate Connection
34