MULTI-STAGE DEPLOYMENT OF ROBOT CONTROL SOFTWARE

For future robot control, there is a strong need for tools and methods supporting the development and deployment of control software. To this end, we propose a method for developing embedded software based on the standard Java language and multi-stage deployment and verification towards the embedded platform. The proposed method allows us to develop embedded Java software on the desktop using standard software tools for implementation, and the majority of testing and verification. The subsequent deployment is done in stages from pure Java to hard real-time embedded C. The source code of the application remains unchanged during all the stages, where components of the platform are changed one at a time. That makes it easier to find and cope with platform-related problems due to different run-time environments and thread models. As enabling technology we use the LJRT platform, a novel solution for hard real-time Java in embedded systems based on Java to C translation, real-time GC, and an off-the-shelf, real-time OS (e.g. Linux/RTAI). The proposed method has been experimentally tested in the development of a robot control application.