Robotics Integrated Development Environment

Welcome to RIDE, the Robotics Integrated Development Environment developed in the University of Vigo. The goal of this project is to provide a set of integrated tools to facilitate the development of mobile robot applications.

RIDE includes a well-conceived architecture together with programming tools to support it. The architecture is based on the modular decomposition of systems into simpler an largely independent components. These components implement primitive actions and report events about their state. These modules are usually connected with different inter-process communication mechanisms (in our case IPC and JIPC). The robot programming framework proposed here includes a tool (RoboGraph) to program and coordinate the activity (tasks) of these middleware modules. This tool can be easily extended to any architecture that uses a publish/subscribe communication approach.

Project developers use the same task programming IDE (RoboGraph) on two different levels. The first is to program tasks that must be executed by one robot and the second is to program tasks that can include several robots and building elements.

Tasks are described using an interpreted Petri net editor and stored in an xml file. A dispatcher loads these files and executes the different Petri nets as needed. A monitor that shows the state of all the running nets is very useful for debugging and tracing purposes.