Structured Design and Development of Domain-Specific Languages in Robotics

Robot programming is an interdisciplinary and knowledge intensive task. All too often, knowledge of the different robotics domains remains implicit. Although, this is slowly changing with the rising interest in explicit knowledge representations through domain-specific languages (DSL), very little is known about the DSL design and development processes themselves. To this end, we present and discuss the reverse-engineered process from the development of our Grasp Domain Definition Language (GDDL), a declarative DSL for the explicit specification of grasping problems. An important finding is that the process comprises similar building blocks as existing software development processes, like the Unified Process.