Implementing best practices for systems integration and distributed software development in service robotics - the Care-O-bot®robot family

To date, the complex and diverse demands on robotic software can only be handled by large teams which are often distributed geographically, with each team working on a specific aspect of the robot's functionality. The distributed nature of development and differences in the configuration of standard robot platforms impose particular challenges on the process of system integration. To address these challenges, this paper describes the application of best practices in software engineering to the developer community of the Care-O-bot^® robot family: strictly defined developer roles, management of platform dependencies by Separation of Concerns, and automated testing. The concrete implementation of these concepts in the development process is demonstrated. By analyzing development activities over the last months we can validate the impact of the concepts in the distributed community.

I. Introduction

Application areas for autonomous robots have expanded widely in recent years. Traditionally regarded as reliable helpers in specific industrial manufacturing tasks, robots are now on the verge of becoming ubiquitous parts of everyday human life. This growing importance of service (as opposed to industrial) robotics is reflected in the rapid growth rates of the service robotics market [1].