A novel development paradigm for event-based applications

Application development for highly dynamic and unpredictable scenarios still is a difficult and time-consuming task. This in particular is a problem in the area of robotics: if a certain task should be executed, many asynchronous events can prevent a plan from its termination. In contrast to applications in e.g. office scenarios, interruption as a result of unexpected conditions is the normal case. In this paper we present a novel development approach. It supports graphical programming and allows a developer to easily formulate complex tasks. The model covers both the flow of actions and the flow of data in a single representation. In addition, it simplifies the modeling of interruptions and asynchronous events. We implemented and tested the approach with our Carbot platform.