Managing the Functional Variability of Robotic Perception Systems

Abstract

Abstract-Control systems for autonomous robots are concurrent, distributed, embedded, real-time and data intensive software systems. A real-world robot control system is composed of tens of software components. For each component providing robotic functionality, tens of different implementations may be available.The difficult challenge in robotic system engineering consists in selecting a coherent set of components, which provide the functionality required by the application requirements, taking into account their mutual dependencies. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that robotics system integrators and application developers are usually not specifically trained in software engineering.Current approaches to variability management in complex software systems consists in explicitly modeling variation points and variants in software architectures in terms of Feature Models.The novel contribution of this paper is the description of the integration of two modeling languages and toolkit, namely HyperFlex [14] for functional variability modeling and the Robot Perception Specification Language (RPSL) [17], a Domainspecific Language (DSL) enabling domain experts to express the architectural variability of robot perception systems.

Variability Analysis for Robot Operating System Applications

“…More than half of these (26) are ROS names for nodes and channels that must be provided by the user, seen in TurtleBot2, Lizi and Husky. The remaining arguments (17) pertain to third-party packages, indicating launch and data files to import. Since third-party packages are not part of the subject systems per se, we left their features out of our measurements.…”

“…Lastly, in stark contrast to our approach, HyperFlex [17] is a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) toolkit. Users of HyperFlex build architectural diagrams and feature models using mostly visual representations, which can then be instantiated to concrete implementations, configured via automatically generated code -which, in ROS, corresponds to automatically generating launch files.…”

RuVa: A Runtime Software Variability Algorithm

“…Variability in robotics has been suggested in previous works for modeling the context features of a robot [40] and more recently in approaches managing the functional variability of robots implemented using a domain-specific language (i.e. Robot Perception Specification Language) [41] and cardinality-based feature modeling approaches [42]. Other works [43] model the variability of robots to simulate quality properties at runtime.…”

Software Product Line Engineering for Robotic Perception Systems

“…In a previous paper [11] we have presented a Model-based approach to the development of SPL for robotic perception systems, which integrates two modeling technologies developed by the authors: the HyperFlex toolkit [19] and the Robot Perception Specification Language (RPSL) [21].…”