Stream-oriented robotics programming: The design of roshask

The decomposition of robotics software into a collection of loosely coupled processes has become a core design principle of virtually every large robotics software engineering effort over the past decade. Recently, the ROS software platform from Willow Garage has gained significant traction due to its adoption of sound design principles and significant software library contributions from Willow Garage itself. This paper describes a binding from the Haskell programming language to basic ROS interfaces. The novelty of these bindings is that they allow for, and encourage, a higher level of abstraction in writing programs for robots that treat streams of values as first-class citizens. This approach makes the fusing, transforming, and filtering of streams fully generic and compositional while maintaining full compatibility with the existing ROS ecosystem.