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OBJECT-ORIENTED EMBEDDED SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
METHOD FOR EASY AND FAST PROTOTYPING

T. Vallius, J. Haverinen and J. Roning

Computer Engineering Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Oulu
P.O. Box 4500
FIN-90014 Oulu, Finland

ABSTRACT
Traditionally, embedded system design requires a considerable amount of expertise, time and money.
This complicates the testing of new research results in robotics with real embedded systems, which
would be necessary to bring the results into real use. We are studying an easy and fast embedded
system development method that enables people without special skills in electronics or embedded
systems to create such systems. We hope that this method will ultimately enable utilization of
electronics also in research domains where electronics skills are usually not available. In this paper, we
present an embedded object based architecture, and the ideology of fitting this architecture into the
common object-oriented methods used in software development. We also describe its application to
combined software and hardware entities. This paper concentrates on explaining the ideology and
architecture of this approach.

KEYWORDS
Object-oriented, embedded systems, embedded object, easy, fast, architecture

INTRODUCTION

Motivation

In academic research involving embedded systems (for example in robotics), research on new ideas
usually proceeds as follows: the researcher gets an idea and formulates a hypothesis about it. A model
is created to examine the hypothesis. The model is then simulated and modified iteratively several
times. Finally, the results are tested in a real embedded system, and depending on the results, the
researcher may have to return to one of the previous phases again. Sometimes there exists a significant
threshold to real hardware tests. This is because the actual process of building a device to test research
results in practice requires a completely new project, another people, lots of expertise, and more time