NUbugger: A visual real-time robot debugging system

Abstract

As modern autonomous robots have improved in their ability to demonstrate human-like motor skills and reasoning, the size and complexity of software systems have increased proportionally, with developers actively working to leverage the full processing performance of next-generation computational hardware. This software complexity corresponds with increased difficulty in debugging low-level coding issues, with the traditional methodology of inferring such issues from emergent high-level behaviour rapidly approaching intractability. This paper details the development and functionality of NUbugger: a visual, real-time and open source robot debugging utility that provides the user with comprehensive information regarding low-level functionality. This represents a paradigm shift from corrective to preventative debugging, and concrete examples of the application of NUbugger to the identification of fundamental implementation errors are described. The system implementation facilitates simple and rapid extension or modification, making it a useful utility for debugging any similar complex robotic framework. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.