A Software Architecture Framework for Home Service Robots

Over the last years, home service robots have a wide range of potential applications, such as home security, patient caring, cleaning, etc. When developing robot software, one of the main challenges is to build the software architectural model. Software architecture is used throughout the software life-cycle for supporting analysis, guiding development, and acting as a roadmap for designers and implementers. Though many software architectures for robotic systems have been defined, none of them have reached all its objectives due to the great variability among systems behaviors, and still lack of systematic techniques to derive the robot software architecture from its requirements model. In this paper, we present a generic architectural model for home service robots, allowing for software architecture design, and preserving a continuous architectural view all along the development cycle. While avoiding the predominant decomposition problems, our approach allows for integration of the architectural components in a systematic and comprehensive way for efficient maintainability and reusability.