An investigation into the development of service-oriented robotic systems

Abstract

Robotics has emerged as one of the most prominent research areas in the last years. To cope with the great variety of robots application areas, as well as the heterogeneity of the robots, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been adopted to develop robotic systems, i.e., the software systems that manage the robots. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies that provide an updated, fair overview of the development of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS), i.e., software systems composed by services. The main contribution of this paper is to present a detailed, analytical panorama of SORS, their implementation technologies, and software engineering guidelines that support development of such systems. For this, we have applied steps of the systematic review technique. As main results, we have observed that, in spite of relevant contributions already found in this area, it is still necessary considerable efforts to consolidate the research in SORS. Furthermore, we intend that this work makes also possible to identify important research topics for future research.

Towards a Process to Design Architectures of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems

“…The process also encompasses the main phases proposed by the consolidated SOMA (Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture) method [8]. ArchSORS was established based on SORS software architectures available in the literature [5], a set of reference architectures that encompass knowledge of how to structure robotic systems [9], and our expertise on critical embedded systems. Fig.…”

“…Designing robotic systems using SOA allows integration of heterogeneous hardware devices and reuse of complex algorithms, since services are provided through auto-descriptive standard interfaces. Due to its relevance, several works reporting the use of SOA in robotics are available in literature, such as those that we identified in our previous work [5]. Besides that, development environments specially focused on the design of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS) can be also found [6,7].…”

RoboSeT: A Tool to Support Cataloging and Discovery of Services for Service-Oriented Robotic Systems

“…In a broad, systematic literature review carried out in a previous work [30], we identified 39 studies dedicated to investigate and consolidate the use of SOA in robotics. According to such review, the first attempt to use SOA in robotics was proposed in 2003 by Lee et al [26], which described an architecture for integrating different robots in a multi-robotic application.…”

“…Therefore, we proposed a taxonomy [31], which is a form of classification widely accepted in different domains, such as software architecture [10] and robotics [11]. This taxonomy of services is based on the SORS available in the literature [30], a set of reference architectures of robotics [12], and expertise and knowledge of specialists on how to develop robotic systems. It was evaluated by software architects, software engineers, software developers, and research team leaders from six different institutions of five countries, from both academy and industry.…”

“…The use of SOA is enabling developers to overcome traditional problems of robotics design, such as the integration of heterogeneous hardware devices and reuse of complex algorithms [2]. Several studies reporting on the development of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS) can be found in the literature and a large number of services are already available for reuse [30]. Most of these services were developed on two well-known environments specially focused on SORS: Robot Operating System (ROS) [36] and Microsoft Robotic Developed Studio (MRDS) [24].…”