Measurement-based real-time analysis of robotic software architectures

Providing guarantees on the system behavior is mandatory in order to let the robots enter our every-day life. Among these guarantees, proving the fulfillment of real-time constraints on the software is a key issue, as their violation could result into unexpected and unsafe behaviors. In this paper, we present a methodology to guarantee real-time constraints on component-based software architectures of robots. This methodology relies on the MAUVE language to model the component architecture, and on a set of analysis tools that first estimate the worst case execution time of elementary functions from actual component traces, and then check the real-time constraints of each component. We illustrate this process on the architecture developed for the autonomous navigation of a partially known area by a mobile robot.