Urbi: a new parallel & event-driven script language for robotics, games and more

Google Tech Talks July 7, 2008 ABSTRACT Urbi is a middleware for concurrent and distributed programming, based on a new parallel and event-driven script language called 'urbiScript'. Using a familiar and easy-to-use syntax, the language offers several concurrent abstractions rooted in the language semantics, together with an integrated scheduler and a distributed component architecture called UObject, based on C++ or Java. urbiScript acts as an orchestrator to build interactions/behaviors between distributed UObjects. Successful applications of Urbi are now mostly in robotics, especially in the upcoming Robocup'08 events, but extensions to video games and complex systems programming are envisioned. Graphical tools have recently been added to the Urbi suite to create hierarchical finite state machines and to provide advanced debugging features. J.C. Baillie, the author of Urbi, will give a detailed technical presentation of the key aspects of this new technology, and show demonstrations of the "Urbi Studio" graphical tools with the Aibo robot. See http://www.gostai.com/ Speaker: Dr. Jean-Christophe Baillie Dr. Jean-Christophe Baillie graduated in Computer Science and Physics from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He received the PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Paris 6 and Sony Computer Science Lab and then founded the Cognitive Robotics Lab in ENSTA/ParisTech. During 4 years he worked on developmental robotics research with an extension of the Talking Heads experiment initiated by Luc Steels (Sony CSL). During the course of his researches, he designed Urbi as a tool to control complex robotics systems like the Aibo. In 2006, he founded Gostai, to further develop the Urbi technology and he is now directing the company, while keeping an active part in the R activities. He received in 2007 the "Pierre Faurre" award from the Polytechnique Foundation.