Composition, separation of roles and model-driven approaches as enabler of a robotics software ecosystem

Abstract

Successful engineering principles for building software systems rely on the separation of concerns for mastering complexity. However, just working on different concerns of a system in a collaborative way is not good enough for economically feasible tailored solutions. A successful approach for this is the composition of complex systems out of commodity building blocks. These come as is and can be represented as blocks with ports via data sheets. Data sheets are models and allow a proper selection and configuration as well as the prediction of the behavior of a building block in a specific context. This chapter explains how model-driven approaches can be used to support separation of roles and composition for robotics software systems. The models, open-source tools, open-source robotics software components and fully deployable robotics software systems shape a robotics software ecosystem.