Approach
To achieve its objectives, BRICS will cooperate with all interested stakeholders, in an open-minded and critical-constructive atmosphere in order to develop a design methodology focusing on four fundamental issues:
- provision of hardware components with harmonised and open interfaces,
- identification of best practice in robot algorithms, software components, and architectures,
- design of an integrated robot development environment that supports rapid and flexible configuration of new robot platforms and the development of new robot applications, and
- cross-sectional activities addressing robust autonomy, openness and flexibility, and harmonisation and benchmarking.
BRICS will develop two major complementary software packages:
- BRIDE (BRics Integrated Development Environment) will be based on the well-supported and widely-adopted Eclipse platform. Eclipse has been accepted by many other domains as the vehicle for providing integrated tool chains to make the development of complex systems easier and to ensure higher quality. The software engineering methodology behind this is Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), which provides developers with best practice models that
- allow for a design with higher-level, abstract components,
- hide the details of implementations and middleware, an
- support automatic model validation and code generation, where appropriate.
- BRIDE will benefit from other Eclipse-based developments, especially in related domains such as embedded systems and the automotive industry.
- BROCRE (BRICS Open Code Repository; pronounced "broker") offers interoperable interfaces and source code components, that implement a wealth of robotics functionality, especially for the application programming interfaces (APIs) defined in the project. BRICS will provide an initial repository of easy-to-use, best practice software components covering the most relevant, but certainly not all desirable robotics functionalities. This initial repository is expected to convince other stakeholders of the advantages of using the BRICS methodology and software tools. Their involvement will then result in a gradual extension of the code repository.