Urbi

Urbi (Universal Real-Time Behavior Interface) is an open source cross-platform software platform in C++ used to develop applications for robotics and complex systems. Urbi is based on the UObject distributed C++ component architecture. It also includes the urbiscript orchestration language which is a parallel and event-driven script language. UObject components can be plugged into urbiscript and appear as native objects that can be scripted to specify their interactions and data exchanges. UObjects can be linked to the urbiscript interpreter, or executed as autonomous processes in "remote" mode.

The urbiscript Language

The urbiscript language has been developed since 2003 by Jean-Christophe Baillie in the Cognitive Robotics Lab of ENSTA, Paris. It is now actively and further developed in the industry through the Gostai company founded in 2006.

The urbiscript language can be best described as an orchestration script language: like Lua in video games, urbiscript can be used to glue together C++ components into a functional behavior, the CPU-intensive algorithmic part being left to C++ and the behavior scripting part being left to the script language which is more flexible, easy to maintain and allows dynamic interaction during program execution. As an orchestration language, urbiscript also brings some useful abstractions to the programmer by having parallelism and event-based programming as part of the language semantics. The scripting of parallel behaviors and reactions to events are core requirements of most robotic and complex AI applications, therefore urbiscript (and the whole Urbi platform) is well suited to these applications.

Language Attributes

• Parallelism and event-based programming
• Prototype-based programming
• C++ like syntax
• C++ based component architecture (UObject) with possibility to link objects or run them remotely
• Client/Server based architecture
• Client interfaces with Java and Matlab (Urbi SDK)
• Cross platform: Linux, Mac, Windows and others. Embeddable, URBI can run on various processors: x86, ARM, mips, powerPC, etc.
• Taggable commands for execution flow control

See also

• Robotics suite
• Player Project - probably the most-used robot interface in research and post-secondary education (open source)
• ROS (Willow Garage)