Conductor: A controller development framework for high degree of freedom systems

This paper details a new robotics programming framework called Conductor. The framework is unique in that it represents the hardware-software interface, and a user's interaction with that interface, in terms of state variables. Within Conductor hardware is represented to the user by its states of interest, with all other interface concerns abstracted to the greatest extent possible. This representation is enabled by a five-layered component structure which this paper describes. The structure of the program allows a designer to take advantage of bandwidth-saving optimizations in high degree of freedom cases and significantly improve performance over that of current tools.