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Universal programming interfaces for robotic devices

Published: 12 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Robotic devices, whether service robots designed to help people or entertainment robots, are more and more widespread, and their number is increasing. All these robots currently have a different programming interface, more or less complex and more or less powerful. The situation is reminding of the 80's and the personal computer revolution: many vendors, models and as many programming languages and interfaces. We have developed URBI, a Universal Robotic Body Interface in an attempt to address this issue and provide a standard and simple way to control robots, while still providing powerful high-level capabilities expected from a modern programming language. To achieve this, URBI is based on a client/server architecture where the server is running on the robot and accessed by the client, typically via TCP/IP. The client can be any system, thus giving a great deal of flexibility. The URBI language is a high level scripted interface language used by the client and capable of controlling the joints of the robot or accessing its sensors, camera, speakers or any accessible part of the machine, We present in this article a short introduction to URBI and show application examples with Aibo. We finally explore how URBI could impact the development of everyday robotics and facilitate the interaction between robots, computers and smart objects in general.

References

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J. C. Baillie. Urbi: Towards a Universal Robotic Body Interface. in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Humanoids Robotics, 2004.
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J. C. Baillie. URBI: Towards a Universal Robotic Low-Level Programming Language. in Proceedings of IROS'05 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems).
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J. C. Baillie, Urbi language specification. www.urbiforge.com, urbi.sourceforge.net, 2005.
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  • (2011)SPORTSBETProceedings of the 2011 Eighth International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems10.1109/QEST.2011.30(155-156)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2011
  • (2009)NXTalkProceedings of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies10.1145/1735935.1735942(38-49)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2009
  • (2009)Cognitive map architectureIEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine10.1109/MRA.2008.93163416:1(55-66)Online publication date: Mar-2009
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cover image ACM Other conferences
sOc-EUSAI '05: Proceedings of the 2005 joint conference on Smart objects and ambient intelligence: innovative context-aware services: usages and technologies
October 2005
316 pages
ISBN:1595933042
DOI:10.1145/1107548
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 12 October 2005

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sOc-EUSAI05
sOc-EUSAI05: Smart Objects & Ambient Intelligence
October 12 - 14, 2005
Grenoble, France

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Cited By

View all
  • (2011)SPORTSBETProceedings of the 2011 Eighth International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems10.1109/QEST.2011.30(155-156)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2011
  • (2009)NXTalkProceedings of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies10.1145/1735935.1735942(38-49)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2009
  • (2009)Cognitive map architectureIEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine10.1109/MRA.2008.93163416:1(55-66)Online publication date: Mar-2009
  • (2009)From Requirements to Code RevisitedProceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Object/Component/Service-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing10.1109/ISORC.2009.29(228-235)Online publication date: 17-Mar-2009

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