Model-driven separation of concerns for service robotics

Abstract

Robotics currently adopts model-driven engineering focusing software modeling languages. This forces domain experts to employ these languages instead of enabling application of more appropriate DSLs. This ultimately produces monolithic, hardly reusable applications. We present an infrastructure for the development of service robotics applications employing DSLs aimed at domain experts and tailored to domain challenges. It facilitates separation of concerns of participating robotics, domain, and software engineering experts and integrates their models via a component & connector reference architecture and a combined code generation framework. The infrastructure was successfully deployed and evaluated with robotics manufacturers, caregivers, and software engineers in a German hospital. We believe that model-driven engineering with languages tailored to the various stakeholders’ needs can greatly facilitate robotic application engineering.