Advancing robot software development with Flexbot

Does developing robot software seem both expensive and challenging? Flexbot equips you with a robot software platform that accelerates your product development and saves costs.

Robot software engineering is greatly accelerated by using a platform that automates the boring, but necessary, details of complex, concurrent and real-time software construction. Instead of dedicating resources to building a platform, you can channel your efforts into developing algorithms and shaping your business logic.

More development speed and cost savings

Flexbot assists in defining the communication structure of your software, and then automates the generation of messaging, component isolation, concurrency management, and logging infrastructure. Building software with Flexbot starts from a machine-readable structural specification that is used to code-generate a communication and concurrency skeleton of the application.

With Flexbot, the software is mapped to single or multiple processors by the specification. There is no need to modify algorithms in order to scale the software up from a single processor to multiple computers. 

Generated messaging logic selects the most lightweight communication mechanism applicable, based on the mapping of the communicating components. Components in the same thread of execution can simply use subroutine calls, whereas components on different computers need to use serialization and network protocol stacks. 

Flexbot reduces the possibility of errors. With its message-based paradigm, Flexbot simplifies development by facilitating the division of tasks into manageable subtasks. Because the messaging network is generated from a specification, the specification is always up-to-date with the implementation, which helps to keep the architecture manageable.

Flexbot is also compatible with ROS 2. Flexbot-generated components can co-exist and seamlessly communicate with ROS 2 nodes.

Evolutive software development

Flexbot not only supports writing a new robot application from scratch, but also supports refactoring and developing a pre-existing application. Flexbot can be deployed incrementally without a complete rewrite of the old software. 

Flexbot’s evolutive development approach involves a step-by-step process where hardware and software are initially separated. Small steps ensure a fail-safe transition to the previous version at any point, while maintaining a functional, testable and deliverable software at all steps. This strategy allows software evolution with minimal disruption.

Juhana Helovuo
Chief Research Officer

Juhana Helovuo has been leading Atostek’s development of AGV and cargo handling robot software for key clients such as Kalmar and Mitsubishi Logisnext since 2005. He is a hands-on software engineer who can design advanced algorithms, as well as an R&D executive capable of communicating ideas to business people. Juhana has a Doctor of Science degree in software engineering, which he received in 2006 from Tampere University of Technology.