A Requirements Definition Framework for the Robotic Systems Domain - An Exploratory Study

Abstract

A robotic system is a physical device composed by special-purpose hardware and software that must be integrated to enable a robotic system to function as expected. The first step towards the modeling robotic systems is to determine its requirements, which is a description of how the system should behave together with constraints on its operation. Much research effort in the last two decades has been invested to support requirements engineering (RE) for general systems. However, to our knowledge, there is no framework to properly support RE for robotic systems. Hence, we conducted an exploratory study aiming to answer the question "What technical features affect the RE for the robotic systems domain?" Based on what we learned in the study, we point out some challenges and issues in RE for the robotic systems domain. Additionally, we provide a framework to identify and manage several technical features which affect RE for this domain.