An investigation into the development of service-oriented robotic systems

Abstract

Robotics has emerged as one of the most prominent research areas in the last years. To cope with the great variety of robots application areas, as well as the heterogeneity of the robots, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been adopted to develop robotic systems, i.e., the software systems that manage the robots. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies that provide an updated, fair overview of the development of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS), i.e., software systems composed by services. The main contribution of this paper is to present a detailed, analytical panorama of SORS, their implementation technologies, and software engineering guidelines that support development of such systems. For this, we have applied steps of the systematic review technique. As main results, we have observed that, in spite of relevant contributions already found in this area, it is still necessary considerable efforts to consolidate the research in SORS. Furthermore, we intend that this work makes also possible to identify important research topics for future research.