Domain Specific Language for Geometric Relations between Rigid Bodies targeted to robotic applications

This paper presents a DSL for geometric relations between rigid bodies such as relative position, orientation, pose, linear velocity, angular velocity, and twist. The DSL is the formal model of the recently proposed semantics for the standardization of geometric relations between rigid bodies, referred to as `geometric semantics'. This semantics explicitly states the coordinate-invariant properties and operations, and, more importantly, all the choices that are made in coordinate representations of these geometric relations. This results in a set of concrete suggestions for standardizing terminology and notation, allowing programmers to write fully unambiguous software interfaces, including automatic checks for semantic correctness of all geometric operations on rigid-body coordinate representations. The DSL is implemented in two different ways: an external DSL in Xcore and an internal DSL in Prolog. Besides defining a grammar and operations, the DSL also implements constraints. In the Xcore model, the Object Constraint Language language is used, while in the Prolog model, the constraint are natively modelled in Prolog. This paper discusses the implemented DSL and the tools developed on top of this DSL. In particular an editor, checking the semantic constraints and providing semantic meaningful errors during editing is proposed.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2012 (arXiv:cs/1302.5082

Semiconductor-metal transition in ALD deposited vanadium oxide thin films and nanoparticles

We report on ALD of vanadium oxides from tetrakis(ethylmethylamino)vanadium as metal-organic precursor, with a comparison between H2O, O3 and O2 plasma as reactants. Depending on the reactant, the as deposited film consisted of amorphous VO2 or crystalline V2O5, as confirmed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) (Figure 1(a)) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). In-situ XRD was used to monitor the crystalline phase formation during post-deposition annealing. By carefully controlling the oxygen partial pressure, relatively smooth films of single phase VO2(R), VO2(B), V6O13 and V2O5 could be obtained. Depending on the reactant used during deposition, VO2(R) and VO2(B) were stabilized in a mixture of 5000 Pa H2 and 20 Pa O2 mixture during annealing (Figure 1(b)). The tetragonal VO2(R) films showed a reversible semiconductor-metal transition to monoclinic VO2(M1) during cooling below 68°C, often referred to as a metal-insulator transition. Accompanied with this structural transition, changes in sheet resistance of more than three orders of magnitude were observed in films with a thickness from 10 to 30 nm, which is an improvement by an order of magnitude compared to sputtered films (Figure 1(c)). In addition, VO2 nanoparticles were synthesized by agglomeration of thinner films upon crystallization. These nanoparticles showed an optical semiconductor-metal transition with a hysteresis as large as 50°C (Figure 1(d))