Designing dynamic software architecture for home service robot software

Abstract

Behavior, situations and environmental changes in embedded software, such as robot software, are hard to expect at software design time. To deal with dynamic behavior, situations and environmental changes at runtime, current software engineering practices are not adequate due to the hardness of software modification. An approach to resolve this problem could be making software really "soft" that enables runtime software modification. We developed a practical framework called SHAGE(Self-Healing, Adaptive, and Growing SoftwarE) to implement reconfigurable software in home service robots. SHAGE enables runtime reconfiguration of software architecture when a service robot encounters unexpected situations or new user requirements. This paper focuses on designing reconfigurable software architecture, so called, dynamic software architecture. We also conducted a case study on a home service robot to show applicability of the framework. The results of the study shows practicality and usefulness. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.