PredN: achieving efficiency and code re-usability in a programming system for complex robotic applications

The aim of this paper is to present our attempt to create a development platform for complex robotic applications. Such a system needs appropriate tools for handling real-time aspects, distributed architectures, portability through heterogeneous hardware, and code re-usability. We show in this paper that, by constraining the shape of an application, specifying its scheduling and building a separate representation of the hardware, it is possible to realize a system where all those aspects are integrated. The major properties of our system is a strong multithreading architecture, the possibility to handle design patterns, and a powerful model of hardware platforms using a hypergraph