URBI: towards a universal robotic low-level programming language

The growing diversity and complexity of existing robotic devices like humanoids, animal-like robots or wheeled robots, lead to the development of several incompatible software interfaces to control these robots. We believe that there is a need for a standard which could be universal, powerful and easy to use. The open source project URBI, a universal robotic body interface, aims at providing the ground for such a standard. It is based on a client/server architecture where the server is running on the robot and accessed by the client, on the robot or remotely via TCP/IP. The URBI language is a scripted language used by the client and capable of controlling the joints of the robot or access its sensors, camera, speakers or any accessible part of the machine. We present in this article an introduction to URBI and we describe how URBI differs from currently existing solutions. As an example making use of URBI-specific features, we present a simple perturbative approach to walk pattern generation, with URBI running on a ERS7 Aibo robot.