DyKnow: A dynamically reconfigurable stream reasoning framework as an extension to the robot operating system

DyKnow is a framework for stream reasoning aimed at robot applications that need to reason over a wide and varying array of sensor data for e.g. situation awareness. The framework extends the Robot Operating System (ROS). This paper presents the architecture and services behind DyKnow's run-time reconfiguration capabilities and offers an analysis of the quantitative and qualitative overhead. Runtime reconfiguration offers interesting advantages, such as fault recovery and the handling of changes to the set of computational and information resources that are available to a robot system. Reconfiguration capabilities are becoming increasingly important with the advances in areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT). We show the effectiveness of the suggested reconfiguration support by considering practical case studies alongside an empirical evaluation of the minimal overhead introduced when compared to standard ROS.