The Need for Autonomy and Real-Time in Mobile Robotics: A Case Study of XO/2 and Pygmalion

Starting from a user point of view the paper discusses the requirements of a development environment (operating system and programming language) for mechatronic systems, especially mobile robots. We argue that user requirements from research, education, ergonomics and applications impose a certain functionality on the embedded operating system and programming language, and that a deadline-driven real-time operating system helps to fulfil these requirements. A case study of the operating system XO/2, its programming language Oberon-2 and the mobile robot Pygmalion is presented. XO/2 explicitly addresses issues like scalabilty, safety and abstraction, previously found to be relevant for many user scenarios.