TRIK studio: Technical introduction

Abstract

This paper presents TRIK Studio - an environment for visual (and textual) programming of robotic kits, which is used in educational organizations across Russia and Europe. First part of the article provides overview of the system - its purpose, features, differences from similar programming environments, general difficulties of robot programming and solutions proposed by TRIK Studio. Second part presents implementation details of TRIK Studio and its most interesting components. This article combines five fields of study: robotics, domain-specific visual modeling, education, formal methods and methods of program analysis. Main contribution of this article is detailed technical description of TRIK Studio as complex and successful open-source cross-platform robot programming environment written in C++/Qt, and first part of the article can also be interesting for teachers as it provides an overview of existing robot programming tools and related problems.

Keywords

• Robotics
• Visual programming
• Educational robotics
• Code generation
• Data-flow languages