SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

Figure 4. The abstractions extracted from the applications’ requirements
remaining (middle) activity. The proposed process also
employs a set of predefined heuristics to automatically generate
an incomplete profile from the domain model. This profile is
then optimized using several guidelines defined by the authors.
These guidelines are intended to ensure the correctness of
profiles and to optimize them.
Based on the experience gained from multiple different
DSL development projects and prototyping experiments,
Strembeck and Zdun [11] have proposed a systematic DSL
development process composed by a set of activities and subactivities.
The process has four main ones: Defining the DSL’s
core language model, Defining the behavior of DSL language
elements, Defining the DSL’s concrete syntax(es) and
Integrating DSL artifacts with the platform/infrastructure.
These activities typically outputs the following artifacts,
respectively: the core language model, the behavior definition,
the concrete syntax(es) and the transformation rules. The first
three artifacts compound the DSL while the last one is related
to the development platform. Those activities have subactivities
and they all have (not rigidly) defined control flows.
They also present activities to tailor the process to “fit into the
corresponding organization’s standard development approach”,
relating project type, involved people, budget, among other
factors.
The main differences between our work and those
described above are twofold: our work focuses on graphical
and external DSLs instead, and it is specific to mobile robots
domain. Moreover, the aforementioned processes are too
generic regarding to application domains.
V. FINAL REMARKS
In this paper we present our efforts towards a process for
engineering DSLs in the context of mobile robots. The
resulting DSLs are initial running version since the process
input is just one application. However, such DSLs are powerful
enough to model other different ones. As long as a DSL is in
use, missing abstractions may be identified, and they could be
added to the language model. We also provide a g eneric
language model, where the domain engineer can simply extend
by adding entities representing (possibly domain specific)
behaviors, specialized functions to sensors, among others. As
our generic language model is based on the well-known
Behavior model, the created DSLs may evolve easily.
Figure 5. The Language Model of the DSL for LEGO Mindstorms
Finally, we present a proof of concept where we applied our
process to obtain a DSL for developing robot applications to
the LEGO Mindstorms platform. We believe our DSL is more
expressive than code since the developer does not need to be
aware of implementation details, like libraries, unity
conversion, programming languages issues, etc.; he/she just
manipulates concepts from the target domain.
As a future work, we are aiming to improve the process by
applying it on different applications implemented in different
robotic platforms. The next step will be to implement different
applications into the Pioneer 3-DX mobile robot platform, and
then emerge DSLs with our process. We are aiming to improve
the identification of abstractions to address more mobile robot
concepts. Another future work is to design a consistent process
or adapt the existing one to address the evolution of those
initial DSLs while they are in use and new abstractions arise.
REFERENCES
[1] S. Kelly and J. P. Tolvanen, Domain-specific modeling. IEEE Computer
Society, 2008.
[2] OMG, “SysML: Systems Modeling Language”, www.omgsysml.org.
[3] M. Mernik, J. Heering and A. M. Sloane, “When and how to develop
domain-specific languages”, ACM Computing Survey, 2005.
[4] T. Stahl and M. Völter, Model-Driven Software Development. Wiley,
2006.
[5] LeJOS, “LeJOS, Java for Lego Mindstorms”, lejos.sourceforge.net.
[6] R. C. Arkin, Behavior-based robotics. Series: Intelligent robots and
autonomous agents. MIT Press, 1998.
[7] T. Bräunl, Embedded robotics: mobile robot design and applications
with embedded systems. 3 rd ed. Springer, 2006.
[8] R. Siegwart and I . Nourbakhsh, Introduction to autonomous mobile
robots. MIT Press, 2004.
[9] S. Günther, M. Haupt and M. Splieth, “Agile engineering of internal
domain-specific languages”, In: “Proceedings of the fifth international
conference on software engineering advances”, 2010.
[10] S. Robert, S. Gérard, F. Terrier and F. Lagarde, “A lightweight approach
for domain-specific modeling languages design”, In: “Proceedings of the
35 th Euromicro conference on software engineering and advanced
applications”, 2009.
[11] M. Strembeck and U. Zdun, “An approach for the systematic
development of domain-specific languages”, “Software: Practice and
Experience”, vol. 39, pp.1253-1292, 2009.
498