ABSTRACT: Control and Coordination in industrial robot applications operating under hard real-time constraints
is traditionally implemented in languages such as C/C++ or Ada. We present an approach to use Lua,
a lightweight and single threaded extension language that has been integrated in the Orocos RTT framework.
Using Lua has several advantages: increasing robustness by automatic memory management and
preventing pointer related programming errors, supporting inexperienced users by offering a simpler syntax
and permitting dynamic changes to running systems. However, to achieve deterministic temporal
behavior, the main challenge is dealing with allocation and recuperation of memory. We describe a practical
approach to real-time memory management for the use case of Coordination. We carry out several
experiments to validate this approach qualitatively and quantitatively and provide robotics engineers the
insights and tools to assess the impact of using Lua in their applications.