BRICS

Despite the fact that robotic development has been going on over the course of multiple decades, there is still nothing remotely close to industry standards. The industry lacks a structured and well-defined process.

The goal of Best Practice In Robotics, or BRICS, is to initiate a change by introducing a more structured and formalized manner of the robot development process. To make this happen, BRICS will provide the engineers and developers with the necessary tools, models and libraries with the purpose of drastically reducing the development time. By creating, documenting and combining the best practices of the world’s leading providers of robotic components, the future of development will look a lot brighter.

By creating this more standardized way of developing robotics, it will not only aid robotic researchers, but also software and hardware developers and system integrators. The objectives of BRICS are to:

• Analyse already completed robot development
• Promote a discussion on robotics’ best practices
• Develop a development environment (BRIDE) and add software that includes best practice robotics algorithms (BROCRE)
• Promote the interoperability of software and hardware
• Present showcases that allow measurement between robot development with and without the best practices method

BRICS is a research project funded by the European Commission in the Seventh Framework Programme.