C or C++ for a Robot?

Question

Greetings,

I am trying to decide between C and C++ for my robot. I am a 5+ year veteran of Visual Basic.NET, however I'm going with Linux (Ubuntu) on this robot, and there is a compatibility problem between Linux and the .NET Framework. I want to stick with whichever language I choose for all of my projects, so I want to make sure that I choose the most appropriate one for the task. For reference, I will describe my current robot in progress and what I am going to do with it. I am in the process of building a full-sized R4 Astromech (yep, I'm one of those guys). I have incorporated a PC motherboard with an Intel Core 2 2.1 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM. I will be using a scratch-built parallel interface card to control the drive motors, head motor, as well as a secondary parallel interface card (going to a second parallel port) which all of the sensors (IR, Ultrasonic Ranging, Visual Recognition via webcam, etc.) will be going to. Commands will be given using speech recognition (currently have a VB.NET scratch-built recognition program that I will be adapting to the new language). Given the specifications and desired goals listed above, would I be better off with C or C++? I greatly appreciate any suggestions that you might have. Thanks! Thaskalas

Answer 1

What do you mean by a compatibility problem? Have you looked at Mono? It's an open-source implementation of the .NET libraries. It's geared toward C# not VB.NET but if you're more comfortable in a .NET environment use that. Speed isn't really an issue here as a Core2Duo is plenty fast for what you need to do.

If Mono won't work for you, I'd recommend C++. There are a lot more libraries out there for C++ (or at least, I am familiar with more, e.g. Boost), which can use most C libraries too. There's no real speed penalty for using C++. While using C wouldn't be bad per-se, C++ has some benefits and no drawbacks, so it's probably the better choice.

Answer 2

I would recommend using ROS. It will let you get started with a sophisticated Inter-Process Communications manager, as well as a large library of sophisticated robotics code, including multiple implementations of SLAM and other critical robotics algorithms. ROS also lets you program in multiple languages, including C, C++, and Python, so you aren't stuck with one language or another down the road.

Answer 3

I would also recommend C++ and ROS. In our company we're migrating to it, because there's so many people working on it, expanding it, and adding lots of cool features.

With this, you can forget about implementing most of the basic low-level stuff and start working on what you intend to research.

It's really easy to set up and start developing.