NUbugger: A Visual Real-Time Robot Debugging System

 

Paper Details

  • Title: NUbugger: A Visual Real-Time Robot Debugging System
  • Authors:
    • Brendan Annable
    • David Budden
    • Alexandre Mendes
  • Keywords:
    • Debugging
    • Robotics
    • Open Source
    • Visualisation

Abstract

As modern autonomous robots have improved in their ability to demonstrate human-like motor skills and reasoning, the size and complexity of software systems have increased proportionally, with developers actively working to leverage the full processing performance of next-generation computational hardware. This software complexity corresponds with increased difficulty in debugging low-level coding issues, with the traditional methodology of inferring such issues from emergent high-level behaviour rapidly approaching intractability. This paper details the development and functionality of NUbugger: a visual, real-time and open source robot debugging utility that provides the user with comprehensive information regarding low-level functionality. This represents a paradigm shift from corrective to preventative debugging, and concrete examples of the application of NUbugger to the identification of fundamental implementation errors are described. The system implementation facilitates simple and rapid extension or modification, making it a useful utility for debugging any similar complex robotic framework.

Publication Details

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date Accepted: 08/05/2013
  • Conference: RoboCup Symposium 2013 (proceedings to be published in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), Springer Verlag)

How to Cite (BibTeX)

{annable2013nubugger,
  title={NUbugger: A visual real-time robot debugging system},
  author={Annable, B. and Budden, D. and Mendes, A.},
  booktitle={RoboCup 2013: Robot Soccer World Cup XVII},
  year={2013},
  organization={Springer}
}

Supplementary Materials

  • Original manuscript available here (the original publication will be available at www.springerlink.com)
  • Corresponding poster can be downloaded here (A0, .pdf format)

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