Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and Models for Robotic Systems (DSLRob 2014)

TL;DR

This workshop highlights the importance of domain-specific languages and model-driven development in robotics, emphasizing their role in improving productivity and addressing complex system challenges.

Contribution

It presents recent advances and discussions on DSLs and MDSD tailored for robotic systems, focusing on their benefits and application challenges.

Findings

DSLs increase programming productivity in robotics

Model-driven development enables high-level system specification

DSLs help address crosscutting concerns like concurrency and uncertainty

Abstract

The Fifth International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and Models for Robotic Systems (DSLRob'14) was held in conjunction with the 2014 International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR 2014), October 2014 in Bergamo, Italy. The main topics of the workshop were Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and Model-driven Software Development (MDSD) for robotics. A domain-specific language is a programming language dedicated to a particular problem domain that offers specific notations and abstractions that increase programmer productivity within that domain. Model-driven software development offers a high-level way for domain users to specify the functionality of their system at the right level of abstraction. DSLs and models have historically been used for programming complex systems. However recently they have garnered interest as a separate field of study. Robotic systems blend hardware and software in a holistic way that intrinsically raises many crosscutting concerns (concurrency, uncertainty, time constraints, ...), for which reason, traditional general-purpose languages often lead to a poor fit between the language features and the implementation requirements. DSLs and models offer a powerful, systematic way to overcome this problem, enabling the programmer to quickly and precisely implement novel software solutions to complex problems within the robotics domain.