MROS: Runtime Adaptation For Robot Control Architectures

Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with contingencies arising from dynamic environments-otherwise, these affect the reliability and quality of the mission execution. Existing proposals on how to build self-adaptive systems in robotics usually require a major re-design of the control architecture and rely on complex tools unfamiliar to the robotics community. Moreover, they are hard to reuse across applications. This paper presents MROS: a model-based framework for run-time adaptation of robot control architectures based on ROS. MROS uses a combination of domain-specific languages to model architectural variants and captures mission quality concerns, and an ontology-based implementation of the MAPE-K and meta-control visions for run-time adaptation. The experiment results obtained applying MROS in two realistic ROS-based robotic demonstrators show the benefits of our approach in terms of the quality of the mission execution, and MROS' extensibility and re-usability across robotic applications

Model-based development of QoS-aware reconfigurable autonomous robotic systems

Complex software systems need to be dynamically reconfigured due to run-time variabilities, such as environmental conditions, workload fluctuation and resources availability. To analyze these autonomous systems it is necessary to put in place methodologies suitable to deal with the diversity of runtime changes during the system evolution. This paper proposes a methodology for modeling the variability and the associated Quality-of-Service (QoS) characteristics of reconfigurable software systems. As a case study, we present the development of a navigation system for autonomous robots that perform logistics tasks