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Specification of Robots |
The use of an external specification language allows the modeling of scenes without any modifications or extensions of the source code of the simulator. Thus the modeling process becomes simpler and people without programming skills are also enabled to use the simulator.
Together with researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems, the specification language RoSiML (Robot Simulation Markup Language) has been developed. It is a part of a joint effort to establish common interfaces for robot simulations. The aim is to exchange components between different simulators and to allow the migration of robot models among simulators without any complicated adaption's.
The language by itself has been specified in XML Schema. This is a popular choice, since XML is supported by a variety of editors and there also exist many ready-to-use parsers. The cascaded structure of XML documents is also quite suitable to reflect the structure of scenes inside the simulator, as it uses the scene graph approach from computer graphics to organize and process all elements.