Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and Models for Robotic Systems (DSLRob 2015)

TL;DR

This paper discusses the use of domain-specific languages and model-driven development for robotics, highlighting their potential to improve programming productivity and address complex system challenges.

Contribution

It provides an overview of the state of DSLs and MDSD in robotics, emphasizing their benefits and recent interest as a distinct research area.

Findings

DSLs enhance programming efficiency in robotics.

Model-driven approaches facilitate high-level system specification.

Interest in DSLs and MDSD for robotics is increasing.

Abstract

The Sixth International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and Models for Robotic Systems (DSLRob'15) was held September 28, 2015 in Hamburg (Germany), as part of the IROS 2015 conference. 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.