Lowering the bar for robotic development : driver generation for ubiquitous robotic systems

Robotics has developed, technologically, to a level where it becomes a field of both interest and importance to other disciplines, either as a proof-of-concept or demonstrative tool, or else as the main focus for implementation of theories. This is particularly evident in the areas of computational and theoretical cognitive science where, despite this progress, robotics remains sufficiently inaccessible to non-specialists as to dissuade its use. This is due in no small part to the issue of code re-usability across differing hardware platforms and the lack of low-level support for developing suitable drivers for the main robotics development tools. To address this issue, this work presents ACorDE: Autonomous Control Development Environment. This development environment takes in data pertaining to the robotic platform and generates suitable driver and behavioural code in a standardised format.