The SPICA Development Framework

Abstract

The development of autonomous mobile robots is a challenge due to the complexity, interdisciplinarity and variety of requirements and components. It is thus quite difficult or even unrealistic to achieve an agreement on a standard development platform for robotic software. In this paper we present SPICA, a model-driven development framework for autonomous mobile robots. With SPICA the developer retains the freedom to choose the most appropriate programming language and underlying platform for the realisation of a specific functional component. Independently developed components are considered as service providers and consumers that interact in order to fulfil the desired functionality. For this purpose, SPICA provides modelling and transformation support to realise such an integration infrastructure for independently developed functional components and different robotic software systems. SPICA has been used successfully in the development of a team of soccer robots for the RoboCup competition.