Modeling and reusing robotic software architectures: The HyperFlex toolchain

Abstract

During the last years robotic researchers have been able of developing extremely complex applications. The complexity of these applications is reflected by the variety of functionalities involved, which are provided by a significant number of components. Although the reuse of software components is becoming a best-practice, the reuse of reference architectures, which model sub-systems providing functionalities common to a great number of applications, is still uncommon.This paper provides two contributions to this topic: (a) a development process that defines how reference architectures can be exploited for building robotic applications, (b) the HyperFlex software toolchain, which has been developed for supporting the design and the reuse of reference architectures. The idea presented in this paper is simple yet powerful: instead of building complex applications by reusing single components, even more complex applications can be developed by reusing reference architectures of mature sub-systems.

RPSL meets lightning: A model-based approach to design space exploration of robot perception systems

“…2) Perception Graph: A Perception Graph in RPSL is a directed acylcic graph whose nodes represent sensor and processing components. Each component has output ports, while processing components also have input ports, both of arbitrary type 3 . Input and output ports can be connected by an edge only if they share the same type.…”

“…Although, many robotic features are nowadays available in the form of reusable software components [1], the task of choosing and composing features while meeting functional and non-functional application requirements remains challenging. This challenge is known as the variability problem [2] [3].…”

“…Those approaches propose domainspecific languages allowing the intuitive representation of functional [3], architectural [2][11] [12][13] and platform [2][11] [12] variabilities. Although the development of robotic systems greatly benefits from those approaches (e.g.…”

Managing the Functional Variability of Robotic Perception Systems

“…HyperFlex [14] is a Model-driven engineering (MDE) toolchain [7] that supports the development of flexible and configurable robotic control systems. It consists in a set of Eclipse plugins for the definition and manipulation of three types of software models, which are completely orthogonal, i.e.…”

“…In previous papers [14], [10] we have presented the HyperFlex Model-driven toolchain and approach for the design of software product lines for autonomous robotic systems.…”