URBI - The Urbiscript Language

The Urbiscript Language

The urbiscript language has been developed since 2003 by Jean-Christophe Baillie in the Cognitive Robotics Lab of ENSTA, Paris. It is now actively and further developed in the industry through the Gostai company founded in 2006.

The urbiscript language can be best described as an orchestration script language: like Lua in video games, urbiscript can be used to glue together C++ components into a functional behavior, the CPU-intensive algorithmic part being left to C++ and the behavior scripting part being left to the script language which is more flexible, easy to maintain and allows dynamic interaction during program execution. As an orchestration language, urbiscript also brings some useful abstractions to the programmer by having parallelism and event-based programming as part of the language semantics. The scripting of parallel behaviors and reactions to events are core requirements of most robotic and complex AI applications, therefore urbiscript (and the whole Urbi platform) is well suited to these applications.