A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantics

This paper presents a novel ontology-driven software engineering approach for the development of industrial robotics control software. It introduces the ReApp architecture that synthesizes model-driven engineering with semantic technologies to facilitate the development and reuse of ROS-based components and applications. In ReApp, we show how different ontological classification systems for hardware, software, and capabilities help developers in discovering suitable software components for their tasks and in applying them correctly. The proposed model-driven tooling enables developers to work at higher abstraction levels and fosters automatic code generation. It is underpinned by ontologies to minimize discontinuities in the development workflow, with an integrated development environment presenting a seamless interface to the user. First results show the viability and synergy of the selected approach when searching for or developing software with reuse in mind.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2015 (arXiv:1601.00877), Stefan Zander, Georg Heppner, Georg Neugschwandtner, Ramez Awad, Marc Essinger and Nadia Ahmed: A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantic

Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity

Conception architecturale des systèmes robotiques orientée services

Robotics has experienced an increasing evolution and interest from the society in recent years. Robots are no longer produced exclusively to perform repetitive tasks in factories, they have been designed to collaborate with humans in several important application domains. Robotic systems that control these robots are therefore becoming larger, more complex, and difficult to develop. In this scenario, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been investigated as a promising architectural style for the design of robotic systems in a flexible, reusable, and productive manner. Despite the existence of a considerable amount of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS), most of them have been developed in an ad hoc manner. The little attention and limited support devoted to the design of SORS software architectures may not only hamper the benefits of SOA adoption, but also reduce the overall quality of robotic systems, which are often used in safety-critical contexts. This thesis aims at improving the understanding and systematization of SORS architectural design.La Robotique a connu une évolution remarquable au cours des dernières années, couplée à un intérêt croissant de la société pour ce domaine. Les robots ne sont plus fabriqués exclusivement pour effectuer des tâches répétitives dans les usines, mais ils sont aussi créés pour collaborer avec les humains dans plusieurs domaines d'application d'importance. Les systèmes robotiques qui contrôlent ces robots sont donc de plus en plus larges, complexes et difficiles à développer. Dans ce contexte, l'Architecture Orientée Services (SOA) a été identifiée comme un style d'architecture logicielle prometteur pour concevoir des systèmes robotiques de manière flexible, réutilisable et productive. Cependant, malgré le nombre considérable de Systèmes Robotiques Orientées Services (SORS) existants aujourd'hui, la plupart d'entre eux ont été développés de manière ad hoc. Le peu d'attention et le soutien limité portés à la conception d'architectures logicielles SORS peuvent non seulement masquer les avantages de l'adoption de la SOA, mais aussi réduire la qualité globale des systèmes robotiques, qui sont souvent utilisés dans des contextes de sécurité critiques. Cette thèse vise à améliorer la compréhension et la systématisation de la conception architecturale SORS. Elle décrit une taxonomie des services pour le domaine de la robotique, puis propose un processus ainsi qu'une architecture de référence afin de systématiser la conception d'architectures logicielles SORS. Les résultats obtenus dans les études d'évaluation montrent qu'à la fois le processus et l'architecture de référence peuvent avoir un impact positif sur la qualité des architectures logicielles SORS et, par conséquent, contribuent à l'amélioration des systèmes robotique

The Emerging Role of Robotics in Personal Health Care: Bringing Smart Health Care Home

Affordable, accessible health care is in short supply in the U.S., due to the rapidly aging population; robotics can provide a solution to this problem. This project developed user requirements for a personal health care robot. From interviews with robotics professionals and focus groups with caregivers and the elderly, the team gained an understanding of potential users’ desired functionalities and acceptance of robots. The team developed a taxonomy to characterize robots’ interaction with users. The requirements generated by the studies were used in conjunction with this taxonomy to recommend a robot for use in personal health care. An in-home monitoring system was found to have the greatest potential to benefit the health care industry and the target demographic

A Model-Based Approach to Managing Feature Binding Time in Software Product Line Engineering

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a software reuse paradigm for developing software products, from managed reusable assets, based on analysis of commonality and variability (C & V) of a product line. Many approaches of SPLE use a feature as a key abstraction to capture the C&V. Recently, there have been increasing demands for the provision of flexibility about not only the variability of features but also the variability of when features should be selected (i.e., variability on feature binding times). Current approaches to support variations of feature binding time mostly focused on ad hoc implementation mechanisms. In this paper, we first identify the challenges of feature binding time management and then propose an approach to analyze the variation of feature binding times and use the results to specify model-based architectural components for the product line. Based on the specification, components implementing variable features are parameterized with the binding times and the source codes for the components and the connection between them are generated

Sustainable supply chain management in the digitalisation era: The impact of Automated Guided Vehicles

Internationalization of markets and climate change introduce multifaceted challenges for modern supply chain (SC) management in the today's digitalisation era. On the other hand, Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) systems have reached an age of maturity that allows for their utilization towards tackling dynamic market conditions and aligning SC management focus with sustainability considerations. However, extant research only myopically tackles the sustainability potential of AGVs, focusing more on addressing network optimization problems and less on developing integrated and systematic methodological approaches for promoting economic, environmental and social sustainability. To that end, the present study provides a critical taxonomy of key decisions for facilitating the adoption of AGV systems into SC design and planning, as these are mapped on the relevant strategic, tactical and operational levels of the natural hierarchy. We then propose the Sustainable Supply Chain Cube (S2C2), a conceptual tool that integrates sustainable SC management with the proposed hierarchical decision-making framework for AGVs. Market opportunities and the potential of integrating AGVs into a SC context with the use of the S2C2 tool are further discussed