A software development environment for autonomous mobile robots

Developing software for actual sensor-based mobile robots is not a trivial task because because of a number of practical difficulties. The task of software development can be simplified by the use of an appropriate environment. To be effective, the software development environment must have the following requirements: modularity, hardware independence, capability to work with an actual or simulated system and independence of control modules from system evaluation. In this paper, the authors propose a software development environment which meets the aforementioned requirements. The environment has been used to develop software in the area of reactive control within the Panorama project. Applications of this software environment in a number of projects at the UPM are described. Portions of this research have been performed under the EEC ESPRIT 2483 Panorama Project