       The BALI Development Environment for Small Mobile Robots

			      Willie Lim
			  Future Minds, Inc.


ABSTRACT

The design and prototyping of a  development environment, called BALI,
for a small  robot, viz., the MIT  6.270  robot, is presented  in this
paper.   BALI is being developed  and  used for research  work using a
6.270-based robot.  Building on the experience with IC (Interactive-C)
for programming the 6.270 robot and new technologies like Java, a more
powerful and low cost robot development  environment is possible.  The
goal  of BALI is to  provide a flexible,  customizable, and extensible
development  environment so that robot  researchers can quickly tailor
BALI to their robots.  Given that the 6.270 robot is really a building
kit made  up of  LEGO blocks (or   similar kinds of  physical building
blocks), the 68HC11-based motherboard, and  a variety of sensors, BALI
cannot be  specially  built for   one "instance"  of the 6.270  robot.
Rather the guiding  principles for building  BALI should be to provide
the  GUI  (Graphical User Interface)   "primitives" from which one can
assemble  and   build his or her   development  environment.  Thus GUI
primitives for  displaying status information,  sensor readings, robot
orientation,   and environment maps  must be  provided.  Much of these
primitives are  already  provided in Java.   It  is the robot-specific
ones that have to be developed  for BALI.  The Java-like language that
forms the core of BALI is the main focus of this paper.

Presented at the Mobile Robots X  Conference (SPIE Conference 2591) in
Philadelphia, Oct. 1995.



