Combining robotics component-based model-driven development with a model-based performance analysis

Real-time properties such as reaction times play a safety-critical role for service robot applications. Current robotic software frameworks and middlewares, however, abstract from the underlying executing platform and execution management of the operating system thereby hiding relevant timing information. In other domains, such as automotive, model-based timing analysis is used early in the development process to analyze timing properties of the system. These approaches are not yet common in the service robotics domain. In this paper, we extend a model-driven development approach for robotic systems and enhance the system-configuration step to include a novel performance view that enables model-based timing analysis for robotic applications. Our evaluation shows that the performance analysis reasonably represents the real robot's run-time performance.