Altaira is designed specifically for the control of small mobile robots, inspired by the 1997 Visual Programming Challenge (VPC). The VPC, conducted as a part of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, was a competition intended to explore the use of visual languages in a particular problem domain, that of mobile robots [3]. Competitors were required to solve three problems: a compulsory problem, which was made available in Spring 1997, an open problem, selected by the competitors, and a final problem, made available shortly before VL'97 [1]. Altaira was used to provide solutions to all of these problems; the compulsory and final problems, along with solutions to them written in Altaira, will be described later in this paper (due to space constraints, the open problem solution will not be described here).
This language draws on two rich sources of prior work: reactive
control of autonomous mobile robots, and rule-based visual languages.