A use case in model-based robot development using AADL and ROS

Abstract

Designing a robotic application is a challenging task. It requires a vertical expertise spanning various fields, starting from hardware and low-level communication to high-level architectural solution for distributed applications. Today a single expert cannot undertake the entire effort of creating a robust and reliable robotic application. The current landscape of robotics middlewares, ROS in primis, does not offer a solution for this problem yet; developers are expected to be both architectural designers and domain experts. In our previous works we used the Architecture Analysis and Description Language to define a model-based approach for robot development, in an effort to separate the competences of software engineers and robotics experts, and to simplify the merge of software artifacts created by the two categories of developers. In this work we present a practical use-case, i.e., an autonomous wheelchair, and how we used a combination of model-based developed and automatic code generation to completely re-design and re-implement an existing architecture originally written by hand.