SeMo: Service-Oriented and Model-Based Software Framework for Cooperating Robots

Abstract

In the near future, it will be common that a variety of robots are cooperating to perform a mission in various fields. A key technical challenge to realize this vision is software challenge on how to specify the mission at the user level and how to program each robot separately. In this paper, we propose a novel software development framework that separates mission specification and robot behavior programming. For mission specification, a novel scripting language is proposed with the expression capability of dynamic mode change and multitasking. For robot behavior programming, an extended dataflow model is used for task-level behavior specification that does not depend on the robot hardware platform. In the proposed framework, the actual robot software is automatically generated from the model. The viability of the proposed framework is demonstrated with two real-life experiments.