A specification of generic robotics software components: future evolutions of GenoM in the Orocos context

Robotics systems and software are becoming more and more complex: the need of standard specifications is certainly a key issue in the near future. There is a need to define, from the software point of view, a generic robot. The Orocos project was started to address this problem. It aims at developing a set of robotics software in particular domains and, as a first step, will define a software framework to do that. This paper presents the future evolutions of G^enoM (component generator) which we propose as a programming framework in the context of the project. G^enoM proposes the definition of generic components that are used to implement robotics functionalities (vision, control, motion planning, ...), and the paper presents the definition of those components. They have been designed so that they can be connected together and externally controlled to form a modular functional layer on robots. We have defined three main entities of which components are made: a set of algorithms, an execution engine, and a communication library. The paper explains their role and presents a formal description language that let us achieves a real decoupling between code of the components (the algorithms) and the execution engine.