A personal robot for mechatronic application programmers. The role of automatic storage reclamation and programming languages in the lifetime of a safe mechatronic system

A software system can be called a safe-system with respect to dynamic memory, when it supports only strong-typing and it doesn't allow for the manual disposal of dynamic memory. The first aspect guarantees that untyped, potentially dangerous operations are caught by the compiler or by run-time checks. The second issue is solved by the utilisation of an automatic memory reclamation scheme, i.e., a garbage collector. We present the implementation of these strategies in the real-time operating system XO/2, and how they have contributed to the realisation of the Mobile Mail Distribution System MoPS, developed at the Institute of Robotics of the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.