Robotics4.NET: software body for controlling robots

As hardware for robots is becoming widely available, better programming abstractions are needed to develop programs controlling robots. In the paper the Robotics4.NET, a framework to develop software aimed at controlling robots of different nature, is introduced. The whole framework is built around the notion of body, which is a software entity connecting the physical structure of the robot to the reasoning modules. The programming abstractions provided by the framework and their implementation are discussed. To validate this framework, experiments were conducted on two robotics architectures: R2D2, a custom made robot equipped with a rich set of sensors and actuators; and ER1, an off-the-shelf, low cost, robotics platform available on-line.