XO/2 - Introduction

XO/2 is an object-oriented, hard-real time system software and framework, designed for safety, extensibility and abstraction. It takes care of many common issues faced by programmers of mechatronic products, by hiding general design patterns inside internal mechanisms or by encapsulating them into easy-to-understand abstractions. Careful handling of the safety aspects has been the criterion by which the system has been crafted. These mechanisms, pervasive yet efficient, allow the system to maintain a deus ex-machina knowledge about the running applications, thus providing higher confidence to the application programmer. The latter, relieved from many computer-science aspects, can better focus his attention to the actual problem to be solved.

XO/2 originates from the ETHZ Institute of Robotics. In the past couple of years I have had the pleasure of teaching and supervising several excellent ETH students when they were studying for a year at Strathclyde.