Combining IEC 61499 model-based design with component-based architecture for robotics

Abstract

The model-driven approach is an increasingly popular trend in software design. It provides many benefits in terms of system design, reusability, and automatic code generation. In the industrial automation domain, the IEC 61499 standard is a recent initiative that adopts this approach. It offers an open, platform-independent framework for designing distributed control systems, whereby the interface and behaviour of a component is described using a function block. On the other hand, in the robotics domain, the Robotic Technology Component specification proposes a framework that allows software components to be easily integrated in a robotic system. The focus of that specification is not so much on the definition of each component's internal behaviour, but rather on the management and interaction of those components. The combination of both these standards offers a comprehensive solution for designing robotic software components in a model-driven approach. This paper describes a tool-chain for doing so, and illustrates its viability through an example. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.