Proceedings of the first international workshop on domain-specific languages for robotic systems

The First International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and models for ROBotic systems (DSLRob'10) was held at the 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'10), October 2010 in Taipei, Taiwan. The main topics of the workshop were domain-specific languages and models. A domain-specific language (DSL) is a programming language dedicated to a particular problem domain that offers specific notations and abstractions that increase programmer productivity within that domain. Models offer a high-level way for domain users to specify the functionality of their system at the right level of abstraction. DSLs and models have historically been used for programming complex systems. However recently they have garnered interest as a separate field of study. Robotic systems blend hardware and software in a holistic way that intrinsically raises many crosscutting concerns (concurrency, uncertainty, time constraints, ...), for which reason, traditional general-purpose languages often lead to a poor fit between the language features and the implementation requirements. DSLs and models offer a powerful, systematic way to overcome this problem, enabling the programmer to quickly and precisely implement novel software solutions to complex problems within the robotics domain.