Aseba

An event-based architecture for distributed control of mobile robots

Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Retornaz, Francesco Mondada

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Introduction

Aseba is an event-based architecture for distributed control of mobile robots. It targets integrated multi-processors robots or groups of single-processor units, real or simulated. The core of aseba is a lightweight virtual machine tiny enough to run even on microcontrollers. With aseba, we program robots in a user-friendly scripting language using a cosy integrated development environment. Aseba applies to several contexts:

• In multi-microcontrollers robots, Aseba takes advantage of the computational power of peripheral microcontrollers to provide hardware modularity, low latency between perception and action, and economical use of the bandwidth of the robot bus. Moreover, its easy to understand scripting language allows fast development of robots' behaviours (EBS-RO 2009 paper).
• In collective robotics, Aseba streamlines the development process by allowing instantaneous changes of the robots code as well as parallel debugging of all robots (SIMPAR 2008 paper).
• In education, the easy to learn language of Aseba, its user-friendly development environment, and the joy of making a robot move provide an original approach to teach and learn programming (FNG 2008 paper).

Aseba is open source and anyone can use and modify it free of charge as long as they respect the license (GNU General Public License version 3).

If you want to learn more about Aseba, please have a look at our presentation or at one of the papers.

Download

EPFL 2009 Robotics Festival edition

This is a full Aseba release at the occasion of the EPFL 2009 Robotics Festival. It is of mature beta quality and is fully usable. In particular, it provides the Aseba Challenge competitive programming game. The latter provides a fun and painless introduction to robots programming.

• Windows ZIP archive : uncompress and run the executable you wish.
• Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 LTS x86-32 deb package : if you are running ubuntu, this package should install automatically. You can then run the program you want (asebachallenge or asebastudio for instance) from the command line.
• Introduction slides to Challenge (English)
• Transparents d'introduction à challenge (français)
• 2008 edition user Manual (English)
• Manuel de l'utilisateur de l'édition 2008 (français)

Development version

The most recent version of the source code of aseba is always available in the subversion repository on gna. Please read readme.txt for compilation instructions.

E-puck Kit

Play with aseba on your e-puck. Download this kit, and read the enclosed install.html file for instructions. You need aseba revision >= 351 to use this kit.

Community, Development, and Bugs

If you want to use or contribute to Aseba, feel free to join the mailing lists.

The development of Aseba takes place on gna, a server providing subversion, bugtracker, and other collaborative facilities for open source projects.

You can report bugs using gna's bug tracker.

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