Program mobile robots in Scheme

The authors have implemented a software environment that permits a small mobile robot to be programmed using the Scheme programming language. The environment supports incremental modifications to running programs and interactive debugging using a distributed read-evaluate-print loop. The programming environment separates the essential onboard run-time system from the development environment, which runs on a separate workstation. The development environment takes advantage of the workstation´s large address space and user environment. It is fully detachable, so that the robot can operate autonomously if desired, and can be reattached for retrospective analysis of the robots behavior. To make concurrent applications easier to write, the run-time library provides multitasking and synchronization primitives. Tasks are lightweight, and all tasks run in the same address space