Visual IoT/Robotics Programming Language in Pi-Calculus

Abstract

As IoT/robotics research and applications expand explosively into many domains in computing, information, and control systems, schools and universities must prepare students to understand and be able to program IoT devices and robots. However, programming IoT and physical devices is hard and depends on good understanding of hardware and low-level programming. Workflow and visual programming environments have been developed to address this issue, including MIT App Inventor, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and VPL (Visual Programming Language), and Intel Service Orchestration Layer. We have developed a new visual programming language and its development environment: ASU VIPLE (Visual IoT/Robotics Programming Language Environment). ASU VIPLE is specifically developed to support different device platforms. It supports LEGO EV3 and all IoT devices based on an open architecture. ASU VIPLE integrates engineering design process, workflow, fundamental programming concepts, control flow, parallel computing, and event-driven programming seamlessly into the curriculum. It has been pilot tested at Arizona State University in summers 2015 and 2016, and is now taught in an ASU regular class, Introduction to Engineering. It has been adopted by numerous universities around the world. This paper focuses on the mathematical model of ASU VIPLE. π-calculus is used to describe the basic activities in VIPLE, as well as the workflow defined by the basic activities.