Spirit: A lightweight programming framework for intelligent system

This paper presents Spirit, a lightweight programming framework for intelligent system. Ease of use and tiny development effort are two key features considered during the design. Spirit is mainly a template class, which provides a configure table, commonly used libraries in system control and computer vision, interprocess communication for parallel programming, hardware middleware for different hardware products, and customizable algorithm functions. Developers utilize Spirit to create modules or even systems for their intelligent applications very quickly as well as using powerful tools in Spirit for convenient debugging. We compared Spirit with existing robot frameworks and proposed a new design criterion. Results show that Spirit gives a better experience on rapid system design and debugging. We used it when developing an intelligent vehicle system.