Development of a Domain-Specific Programming Language for Educational Robotics
Abstract: Considering the advancement of technology and, as a consequence, the facility in accessing it, robotics has been gaining considerable attention in new teaching methodologies nowadays. When applied to the teaching methodology process, robotics is defined by the term Educational Robotics, which consists of the application of robotic kits in the educational process. Those robotic kits can be divided into proprietary and open-source. Proprietary kits have their specific programming language, are fully developed around education, have a high acquisition cost, and do not allow the components to be changed. Also, their programming language is confined to its own components. Open-source robotics kits are less expensive and open for customization, but use general-purpose programming language considered complex to be used by inexperienced users. In this sense, this research proposes the LRE programming language (Linguagem para Robótica Educacional) for open-source kits, structured in Portuguese and including components of programming languages specific to robotics, such as events, and general-purpose constructions such as functions, conditionals, and loops. The developed programming language relies on a dedicated compiler, named LRE, to perform the transformation of user-developed code into target code recognized by the prototyping platform. The LRE compiler consists of a frontend based in LLVM, integrated to the experimental LLVM backend for AVR microcontrollers. In our experiments, the LRE compiler was up to 17 times faster than the development environment Arduino IDE, when generating equivalent codes. However, the target code generated by the LRE compiler is up to 149% larger than a similar code generated by Arduino IDE, mainly due to the use of the experimental backend with few optimizations enabled in the LLVM backend.
Keywords: LRE; Programming Language; Compiler; Educacional Robotics.
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Disclaimer: Although the student carefully wrote the original abstract, and it was revised and improved, English is not him or the advisor' mother language. The original work is written in Portuguese.
Citation: Danilo Martins Rodrigues. Elaboração de uma Linguagem de Programação Específica para Robótica Educacional. Monograph. Bacharelado em Ciências da Computação. Universidade Federal de Goiás, Regional Jataí. Jataí, GO, Brasil. 2018. 65p.
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