Arrows, Robots, and Functional Reactive Programming --- Prelude

Now this is a fun paper. I mean, Category Theory, FRP, and you get to play with Robots! What more could you want? So lets take these three elements individually, and then I will try and summarise the paper.

Category Theory

My understanding of Category Theory is as a systematic treatment of abstraction and generalisation. It allows us to take collections of mathmatical proofs and theorms that have the same structure/form, abstract them into a categorical notation, and then generalise them by providing mappings from the categorial constructs to concepts in specific domains. This is naturally of signifigant interest to type-theorists who treat programs as proofs and want access to the power of parametic/polymorphic types and functions without sacrificing rigor. Arrows are a concept from category theory, a generalisation of Monads which beyond just lifting sequencing to a first-class object, allow parametised composition of sequencing. This gives us the ability to support the more complex temporal sequencing of operations required by...

Functional Reactive Programming

Or as that is a bit of a mouthful, FRP; is one of the most intuitive and widespread programming paradigms in use today. It is an approach to programming that has been made so unobtrusive that four of the five other members of my family use it (in the form of a spreadsheet) without realising they are programming. At a basic level, FRP introduces a new paramatised datatype into the language, the time-varying 'signal'. By then permitting functions to be defined that accept these signals and return time-varying signals, you eliminate the shared-state, duplicated-logic, fragmented code paths, and explicit state-machines spawned by current, traditional event-driven approaches. As a basis for comparison, just imagine comparing a traditional spreadsheet with one where to implement a formula for a cell you would have to attach an 'onChange' callback to each referenced cell that recalculated the value.

Robots

Robots have a number of constraints that have not been traditionally considered strengths of functional programming.

• Large numbers of discrete and continuous time-varying inputs that are most definately *note* referentially transparent.
• Real-time constraints that impose a requirement to avoid time-leaks, which encourages the use of imperative operation sequences. Execution of which can be easilly suspended and resumed as higher priority tasks require resources.
• Extensive use of embedded controllers and limited compuational resources that place a premium on transparency of resource use and strict avoidance of space-leaks.
• A history of research largely based on low level system languages (ie MIML) and assembly, which makes for a hostile reception for many of the assumptions of higher-level functional programming

Of course FRP is a natural fit to the first problem. However it has traditionally done so by trading off certainty and predictability in both time and space analysis. This paper attempts to address these two problems in order to allow the exploitation of FRP's natural (theoretical) fit to robotics to be exploited.