1. INTRODUCTION Developing modern robotic applications involves the production of robust, efficient, and flexible (upgreadable, maintainable, reusable) software. Although this aspect of a robotic application is seldom the focus of study, its influence in the productivity of a robotic research team is of great importance. Several issues arise in this field that affect the results of research in a robotic work: - The integration of multidisciplinary work into a coherent, efficient application. - The reuse of software in future research and in other robotic projects. - Obtaining robust software even after integrating software modules from different programmers with different sensibilities and styles. - Improving parts of the software without affecting the rest of the application. - Designing the robotic application as a distributed program. This will allow to take advantage of different hardware platforms for diverse necessities. The key issue here is how to integrate multidisciplinary software, written by different persons (possibly in different programming languages, operating systems, and using different distribution packages -software for implementing distributed applications-, if any) maintaining its robustness, flexibility, and efficiency. Some solutions to this problem have been presented in the literature during the last decade. A first kind of approaches consists of providing operating systems specifically designed and implemented for their use in robotic applications. E xamples of them are Albatross (Puttkamer and Zimmer, 1991) and Chimera (Stewart et al., 1992). The main advantage of these systems is their high efficiency for the execution of real-time robotic software. Their principal inconvenient is that they are strongly coupled with concrete hardware and software A VISUAL AND PORTABLE TOOL FOR ROBOT PROGRAMMING * Juan A. Fernández, Javier González System E ngineering and Automation Department, University of Málaga Campus Teatinos - Complejo Tecnológico 29071 Málaga (Spain) e-mail: { jafma,jgonzalez} @ ctima.uma.es A bstract: Programming software for complex robotic systems requires powerful tools that allow the programmers to focus on the functionality of their application without getting lost in low-level details (communication software, operating systems, etc), while guaranteeing robustness, flexibility, and efficiency. In previous works a software integrating system called NE X US was presented that achieves these characteristics. This paper presents a visual programming tool called BABE L that fulfills the NE X US specifications and in addition exhibits multilanguage and multidistribution features. It decouples the OS, communication network, and hardware-dependent parts of the modules of the application from their intended functionality. Copyright (c) 2002 IFA C. Keywords: Mobile Robots, Distributed Robotic Control Systems, Software Specification, Robot Programming, Programming E nvironments. _____________________ * This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under the research project CICYT-TAP99-0948. Copyright © 2002 IFAC 15th Triennial World Congress, Barcelona, Spain