Corrado Santoro received his degree in Computing Engineering in 1995 from the University of Catania (Italy), and the Ph.D. in Computing Engineering from the University of Palermo (Italy) in 2000.

In 1988 he was one of the founder member and CTO of Colby Telematic Systems, the Italian company leader in the field of teletext systems. Since 1988, he has been CTO and system consultant in various Italian software companies.

Currently, he is an assistant researcher in Computing Engineering at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Catania. His research interests are in the area of distributed systems, Grid Systems, real-time systems, real-time and embedded Java, mobile agents, multi-agent systems, AI and robotics. He is co-author of many research papers and member of the program committee of various international conferences.

As for Erlang-based systems, he is the co-author of ERESYE, an AI tool for writing expert systems in Erlang, eXAT, a FIPA-compliant multi-agent platform, ROSEN, a graphical tool for simulating 3D environments, and HARTE, a library to support hard-real-time tasks in Erlang.

Since 2006, he has been the co-ordinator of the team of students participating in the "Eurobot" international robotic contest.
This talk will describe ROSEN, an Erlang robotic framework and simulation engine developed by the University of Catania. It is characterised by a layered architecture able to separate the various concurring tasks controlling the system into different modules. The framework is based on OTP principles, making a strong use of behaviors in order to separate generic functionalities from the peculiarities specifics of the robot being implemented. ROSEN and the Robotics framework is based on experiences of competing in the Eurobot competitions in 2006 and 2007, where robots played funny golf and collected materials to be recycled. The talk will end with a case study and video of the Mission to Mars 2008 Eurobot competition, where the team have built robots collecting proof of life on Mars, and bring it back to earth.

The workshop will focus on how to program autonomous mobile robots using the Erlang language and the ROSEN framework.

The framework is based on OTP principles, making a strong use of behaviors in order to separate generic functionalities from the peculiarities of the structure of the specific robot to be implemented.

A tool for simulating the functioning of the robot will be also described, based on the ROSEN, a 3D robotic simulation engine. Thanks to ROSEN, the control system implemented using the framework can be tested by means of a simulation approach. Once tested, it can be deployed onto the real robot.

The workshop will consist of a brief introduction to the problem after which a description of the robotic framework and ROSEN will be provided. Some case studies will highlight how to use these tools to build a real robot; finally, a short overview on swarm robotics will be given, showing how to exploit ROSEN to simulate these kind of systems.

Workshop Outline:

• Issues in autonomous mobile robot programming
• The robotic framework
• ROSEN
• Gluing ROSEN with the robotic framework
• Case study: building a simple robot together
• A step forward: using ROSEN to simulate swarm robotic environments.