Jon Simpson’s Weblog

A paper describing the implementation of a ‘native’ hotel furnishing in BulgariaTransterpreter virtual machine port, to create a first-class occam-pi runtime environment on a commonly available small robotics platform, the LEGO Mindstorms RCX. This paper was presented on July 11th, 2007 at Communicating Process Architectures 2007, University of Surrey, England.
Abstract
The LEGO Mindstorms RCX is a [...]

As part of the Transterpreter California roadshow, Matt, Christian and myself gave a Google TechTalk on Thursday 29th March. We started out with background and an introduction to the occam-pi language, a coverage of parallel models and then progressed to cover the application work from my CPA 2006 paper, Robot Control using the Subsumption Architecture. [...]

Along with Matt and Christian, I was able to attend and take part in the ‘Robots and Robot Venues‘ track at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford in Palo Alto, California. It proved to be an extremely interesting three days, spending time around others working with educational robotics platforms and gaining an insight into some [...]

An exploration of Brooks’ Subsumption Architecture in combination with the occam-pi language for creating robotic control systems. This paper was presented on September 18, 2006 at Communicating Process Architectures 2006, Napier University, Scotland.

In trying to program for real-time control, good platform-assisted concurrency is vastly useful. It seems sensible to keep the limitations of a sequential execution process out of the actual software and instead, in the underlying runtime. (see TVM). Highly concurrent runtimes for small devices aren’t prevalent, and a lot of work with small robotics devices [...]