Software Engineering for Autonomous Robot: Challenges, Progresses and Opportunities

Software engineering for autonomous robot (SE4AR) is an emerging interdisciplinary field with the aims to support the development, running and evolution of software systems for autonomous robot - a safety and mission critical cyber-physical system. Such field has recently gained increasing attentions from both academia and industry and made rapid progresses in the past years. However, many challenges pose on the SE4AR due to the specific features and complexities of autonomous robot software (ARS) and several open problems should be tackled in the future researches. This paper aims to present a comprehensive investigation on the researches and practices of SE4AR. Our contributions are three-fold as follows: an in-depth analysis on the development challenges, a systematic review on the current progresses, and an open discussion of weaknesses in current researches and opportunities in future researches.