Lua in robotics

[Jorge <xxopxe@...>]

Hi to all,

I present Torocó[1], a grad student project. Torocó is a implementation 
of the Subsumption[2] robot control architecture. In Subsumption, the 
robot is controlled by a collection of concurrent modules that interact 
with each other trough inhibition and suppression.

Torocó allows develop control systems for simple mobile robots using 
Lua. It takes the form of a library, which provides the Subsumption 
primitives, with emphasis made on ease of use and simplicity.

Internally is uses a cooperative scheduler[3]. As advantages against 
some popular Subsumption implementations such as the one provided in 
LejOS we can mention:

* It is much closer to the the Subsumtion architecture: it is actually 
concurrent, unlike LejOS's.
* It is throrougly event based, so it is possible to write a full system 
completely polling/busy wait free.
* It's written in/for Lua :)

A small video of a robot avoiding walls and blue cans, and charging the 
red ones (each of the tree behaviors is a concurrent module).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjfyH7S03Mo


Greetings,

Jorge



[1] http://www.fing.edu.uy/~pgtoroco/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
[3] https://github.com/xopxe/Lumen