Increasing decoupling in a framework for programming robots

Robots are becoming widely available and at affordable prices, however we do not have a suitable software infrastructure for programming them yet. A major issue in the field is software reuse: software for robots is inherently tied to the underlying hardware that is difficult to share among different platforms; nevertheless the software modules controlling hardware are often responsible for tough tasks so that a driver-based approach does not fit well the problem. We believe that the missing ability of reusing software in this particular field is due to the way software is organized following a functional decomposition of software modules. In this paper we present Robotics4.NET, a framework for programming robots that takes a different approach at modelling software modules in this domain. We discuss how our approach tends to achieve better decoupling and dependence of the modules in the system, thus making easier software reuse even on different robotic platforms.