A Methodology for Approaching the Integration of Complex Robotics Systems: Illustration Through a Bimanual Manipulation Case Study

Triantafyllou, Pavlos; Rodrigues, Raquel; Chaikunsaeng, Sirapoab; Almeida, Diogo; Deacon, Graham; Konstantinova, Jelizaveta; Cotugno, Giuseppe

doi:10.1109/mra.2021.3064759

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Our contribution suggests an approach to make integration systematic and less error prone, which are key requirements in industry to ensure that robotic systems are reliable and robust from their first production release. We did find that poor integration can negatively impact the performance of novel research contributions to the point that they cannot be used in a production setting ( Triantafyllou et al, 2021 ). Our approach is demonstrated on the real-world scenario of the SecondHands project 3 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

A containerised approach for multiform robotic applications

Cotugno,

Rodrigues,

Deacon

et al. 2024

Front. Robot. AI

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As the area of robotics achieves promising results, there is an increasing need to scale robotic software architectures towards real-world domains. Traditionally, robotic architectures are integrated using common frameworks, such as ROS. Therefore, systems with a uniform structure are produced, making it difficult to integrate third party contributions. Virtualisation technologies can simplify the problem, but their use is uncommon in robotics and general integration procedures are still missing. This paper proposes and evaluates a containerised approach for designing and integrating multiform robotic architectures. Our approach aims at augmenting preexisting architectures by including third party contributions. The integration complexity and computational performance of our approach is benchmarked on the EU H2020 SecondHands robotic architecture. Results demonstrate that our approach grants simplicity and flexibility of setup when compared to a non-virtualised version. The computational overhead of using our approach is negligible as resources were optimally exploited.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

A containerised approach for multiform robotic applications

Cotugno,

Rodrigues,

Deacon

et al. 2024

Front. Robot. AI

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Due to the increasing complexity of robotic systems and the everincreasing diversity of applications and missions of robots, the design and development of performing and correct robotic software architectures has become a major issue [2]. The progress of the software industry has opened new opportunities and made the application of software engineering one of the main research areas in the robotics field, as shown by the important number of recent research works carried out on the development of robotic software ( [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], etc.). One of the challenges of robotics today is to use techniques, tools, and methods that are proven in the development of "traditional" software systems to increase productivity in the development of robotic systems while ensuring the quality of their software architecture.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Model-Based Approach for Common Representation and Description of Robotics Software Architectures

2022

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Unlike conventional software, robotic software suffers from a lack of methods and processes that could systematize and facilitate development. Thus, the application of software engineering techniques is at the heart of current issues in robotics. The work presented in this paper aims to facilitate the development of robotic software and to facilitate communication between experts in the field through the use of software engineering techniques and methods. It proposes RsaML (Robotic Software Architecture Modeling Language), a Domain Specific Modeling Language (DSML) dedicated to robotics, which takes into account the different categories of robotic software architectures and makes it possible to describe the latter independently from the implementation platform. The conceptual model defining the terminology and the hierarchy of concepts used for the description and representation of robotic software architectures in RsaML are presented in this article. RsaML is defined through a meta-model which represents the abstract syntax of the language. The real-time properties of robotic software architectures are identified and included in the meta-model. The use of RsaML is illustrated through several experimental scenarios of the language: the definition of a robotic system and the description of its software architecture, the verification of the semantics of a robotic software architecture, and the modeling of a robotic system whose software architecture does not belong to the usual categories. The support tool used for implementations and experimentation is Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). The results of experimentation showed good working of the proposed solution and made it possible to validate the main concepts of the RsaML language.

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