SORMA was designed to meet the requirements arising from a large set of specialized robotics components in a university research institution (see also Report 96-4). Our experiences show, i. that many robotics experiments and applications typically have been a "one-of-a-kind" process, where often the software was developed from scratch, even though much of the code is similar to code written for other applications; ii. due to the short life-time of single-usage code, extensive, robust, and verbose exception handling is often sacrificed; iii. early sharing and integration of several complex application components, concurently developed by a team of programmers, needs strong tool support.
SORMA encourages the re-use of components by interactive test, exploration, and usage throughout the life span of a software component. At the same time this user-friendlyness does not impair its real-time capabilities.
After describing the SORMA concept, we report on two hybrid integration examples: The "Bielefeld Robot Checkers Player" and a real-time 3D tracking application combining vision and force commands.