Acropolis: A Fast Protoyping Robotic Application

Acropolis is an open source middleware robotic framework for fast software prototyping and reuse ofprogram codes. It is made up of a core software and a collection of several extension modules called plugins. Eachplugin encapsulates a specific functionality needed for robotic applications. To design a robot behavior, a circuit ofthe involved plugins is built with a graphical user interface. A high degree of decoupling between components anda graph-based representation allow the user to build complex robot behaviors with minimal need for code writing. In addition, the Acropolis core is hardware platform independent. Well-known design patterns and layeredsoftware architecture are its key features. Through the description of three applications, we illustrate some of itsusability