Robotics Software Engineering: A Perspective from the Service Robotics Domain

Robots that support humans by performing useful tasks (a.k.a., service robots) are booming worldwide. In contrast to industrial robots, the development of service robots comes with severe software engineering challenges, since they require high levels of robustness and autonomy to operate in highly heterogeneous environments. As a domain with critical safety implications, service robotics faces a need for sound software development practices. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study to assess the state of the art and practice of robotics software engineering. We conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with industrial practitioners working in 15 companies from 9 different countries and a survey with 156 respondents (from 26 countries) from the robotics domain. Our results provide a comprehensive picture of (i) the practices applied by robotics industrial and academic practitioners, including processes, paradigms, languages, tools, frameworks, and reuse practices, (ii) the distinguishing characteristics of robotics software engineering, and (iii) recurrent challenges usually faced, together with adopted solutions. The paper concludes by discussing observations, derived hypotheses, and proposed actions for researchers and practitioners.Comment: 11 pages + 1 page for references, 3 figures, 3 tables, in proceedings of ESEC/FSE 202

Coordinated Execution of Heterogeneous Service-Oriented Components by Abstract State Machines

Abstract. Early design and validation of service-oriented applications is hardly feasible due to their distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous nature. In order to support the engineering of such applications and discover faults early, foundational theories, modeling notations and analysis techniques for component-based development should be revisited. This paper presents a formal framework for coordinated execution of serviceoriented applications based on the OSOA open standard Service Component Architecture (SCA) for heterogeneous service assembly and on the formal method Abstract State Machines (ASMs) for modeling notions of service behavior, interactions, and orchestration in an abstract but executable way. The proposed framework is exemplified through a Robotics Task Coordination case study of the EU project BRICS

Software variability in service robotics

Robots artificially replicate human capabilities thanks to their software, the main embodiment of intelligence. However, engineering robotics software has become increasingly challenging. Developers need expertise from different disciplines as well as they are faced with heterogeneous hardware and uncertain operating environments. To this end, the software needs to be variable—to customize robots for different customers, hardware, and operating environments. However, variability adds substantial complexity and needs to be managed—yet, ad hoc practices prevail in the robotics domain, challenging effective software reuse, maintenance, and evolution. To improve the situation, we need to enhance our empirical understanding of variability in robotics. We present a multiple-case study on software variability in the vibrant and challenging domain of service robotics. We investigated drivers, practices, methods, and challenges of variability from industrial companies building service robots. We analyzed the state-of-the-practice and the state-of-the-art—the former via an experience report and eleven interviews with two service robotics companies; the latter via a systematic literature review. We triangulated from these sources, reporting observations with actionable recommendations for researchers, tool providers, and practitioners. We formulated hypotheses trying to explain our observations, and also compared the state-of-the-art from the literature with the-state-of-the-practice we observed in our cases. We learned that the level of abstraction in robotics software needs to be raised for simplifying variability management and software integration, while keeping a sufficient level of customization to boost efficiency and effectiveness in their robots’ operation. Planning and realizing variability for specific requirements and implementing robust abstractions permit robotic applications to operate robustly in dynamic environments, which are often only partially known and controllable. With this aim, our companies use a number of mechanisms, some of them based on formalisms used to specify robotic behavior, such as finite-state machines and behavior trees. To foster software reuse, the service robotics domain will greatly benefit from having software components—completely decoupled from hardware—with harmonized and standardized interfaces, and organized in an ecosystem shared among various companies

The Cognitive Interaction Toolkit – Improving Reproducibility of Robotic Systems Experiments

Lier F, Wienke J, Nordmann A, Wachsmuth S, Wrede S. The Cognitive Interaction Toolkit – Improving Reproducibility of Robotic Systems Experiments. In: Brugali D, Broenink JF, Kroeger T, MacDonald BA, eds. SIMPAR: International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots. Lecture Notes in Computer Science . Vol 8810. Cham: Springer; 2014: 400-411.Research on robot systems either integrating a large number of capabilities in a single architecture or displaying outstanding perfor- mance in a single domain achieved considerable progress over the last years. Results are typically validated through experimental evaluation or demonstrated live, e.g., at robotics competitions. While common robot hardware, simulation and programming platforms yield an improved ba- sis, many of the described experiments still cannot be reproduced easily by interested researchers to confirm the reported findings. We consider this a critical challenge for experimental robotics. Hence, we address this problem with a novel process which facilitates the reproduction of robotics experiments. We identify major obstacles to experiment repli- cation and introduce an integrated approach that allows (i) aggregation and discovery of required research artifacts, (ii) automated software build and deployment, as well as (iii) experiment description, repeatable exe- cution and evaluation. We explain the usage of the introduced process along an exemplary robotics experiment and discuss our approach in the context of current ecosystems for robot programming and simulation

Simulation and HRI Recent Perspectives with the MORSE Simulator

Lemaignan S, Hanheide M, Karg M, et al. Simulation and HRI Recent Perspectives with the MORSE Simulator. In: Brugali D, Broenink JF, Kroeger T, MacDonald B, eds. Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots. 4th International Conference, proceedings. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI). Vol 8810. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014.Simulation in robotics is often a love-hate relationship: while simulators do save us a lot of time and effort compared to regular deployment of complex software architectures on complex hardware, simulators are also known to evade many (if not most) of the real issues that robots need to manage when they enter the real world. Because humans are the paragon of dynamic, unpredictable, complex, real world entities, simulation of human-robot interactions may look condemn to fail, or, in the best case, to be mostly useless. This collective article reports on five independent applications of the MORSE simulator in the field of human-robot interaction: It appears that simulation is already useful, if not essential, to successfully carry out research in the field of HRI, and sometimes in scenarios we do not anticipate