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Presentation: "Building Languages for Self-Rebuilding Robots"

Track: Robotics and Drones / Time: Monday 13:20 - 14:10 / Location: Christiansborg

Don't ask what robots can do for you, ask what you can do for robotics!

Robotic systems blend hardware and software in a holistic way that raises many crosscutting concerns (concurrency, time constraints, safety, ...), for which reason general-purpose languages often lead to a poor fit between language features and implementation requirements.  In other words: robots are really difficult to program!  Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are a powerful tool for overcoming this problem, enabling the programmer to quickly and precisely solve complex problems within the robotics domain - provided we can get the DSLs right.

In this talk you will learn about self-rebuilding, transforming robots aka self-reconfigurable robots, and in particular how we use DSLs to deal with the issue of programming such robots efficiently.  I'll be talking about he challenges of programming a distributed swarm of unreliable robotic modules, and the lessons learned in evolving a series of DSLs for overcoming these challenges.

Attend this talk to get answers to important questions such as "what are the popular languages and software platforms in the robotics community?"and "how should I go about developing DSLs for robots?".  Along the way you ill also get answers to unconventional questions such as "what does my robot do if I run its controller program in reverse?".

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Ulrik Pagh Schultz, Associate Professor of Robotics and Software Engineering at University of Southern Denmark

Ulrik Pagh Schultz

Biography: Ulrik Pagh Schultz

Ulrik Pagh Schultz has a background in Computer Science, but now mainly does research in robotics at the University of Southern Denmark, where he works with many different kinds of robots - including self-reconfigurable robots, biologically inspired energy-efficient robots, agricultural robots and industrial robots. His goal in life is to ease the pain of programming robots by using domain-specific languages and program generation techniques.
 
Twitter: @ulrikpschultz