Domain Specific Language for Geometric Relations between Rigid Bodies targeted to robotic applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a domain-specific language (DSL) for unambiguously representing geometric relations between rigid bodies in robotics, standardizing terminology and enabling automatic semantic correctness checks.

Contribution

It formalizes a geometric semantics for rigid body relations, implements the DSL in Xcore and Prolog, and develops tools for semantic validation and error detection.

Findings

The DSL enables unambiguous geometric relation representation.

Implementation in Xcore and Prolog demonstrates versatility.

Tools support semantic checking and error reporting.

Abstract

This paper presents a DSL for geometric relations between rigid bodies such as relative position, orientation, pose, linear velocity, angular velocity, and twist. The DSL is the formal model of the recently proposed semantics for the standardization of geometric relations between rigid bodies, referred to as `geometric semantics'. This semantics explicitly states the coordinate-invariant properties and operations, and, more importantly, all the choices that are made in coordinate representations of these geometric relations. This results in a set of concrete suggestions for standardizing terminology and notation, allowing programmers to write fully unambiguous software interfaces, including automatic checks for semantic correctness of all geometric operations on rigid-body coordinate representations. The DSL is implemented in two different ways: an external DSL in Xcore and an internal DSL in Prolog. Besides defining a grammar and operations, the DSL also implements constraints. In the Xcore model, the Object Constraint Language language is used, while in the Prolog model, the constraint are natively modelled in Prolog. This paper discusses the implemented DSL and the tools developed on top of this DSL. In particular an editor, checking the semantic constraints and providing semantic meaningful errors during editing is proposed.