Towards a process to design architectures of service-oriented robotic systems

Abstract

Robots have supported several areas of society, making daily tasks easier and executing dangerous, complex activities. The increasing demand and complexity of these robots have challenged the design of robotic systems, i.e., the software systems that manage robots. In this context, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been pointed out as a promising architectural style to structure such systems, arising the Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS). However, most of software architectures of SORS are still developed in an ad hoc manner. This lack of maturity reduces the potential of SOA in providing important quality attributes, such as reusability and maintainability, therefore affecting the overall quality of these systems. This paper presents ArchSORS, a systematic process that supports the design of software architectures for SORS. Experiment results have pointed out that ArchSORS can produce architectures with more quality, thus contributing to robotics and the areas of society that have gained with the use of robots. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.