Demo abstract: ROSLab — A modular programming environment for robotic applications

We propose a simplified high-level programming language based on blocks and links dragged on a workspace which generates the skeleton code for robotic applications involving different types of robots. In order to develop such a high-level programming language that still can guarantee flexibility in term of implementation, our approach takes advantage of the robot operating system (ROS). ROS is a open source meta-operating system that provides a message passing structure between different processes (or nodes) across a network (inter-process communication). In our framework, we consider a hierarchical approach in which at the base there is ROS that allows inter-process communication between nodes in a robot and on the top we create a high-level language that interacts with ROS and thus with the real robot. The high-level language can be viewed as an extra layer added to simplify lower level code generation.