Software Reuse across Robotic Platforms: Limiting the Effects of Diversity

Robots have diverse capabilities and complex interactions with their environment. Software development for robotic platforms is time consuming due to the complex nature of the tasks to be performed. Such an environment demands sound software engineering practices to produce high quality software. However software engineering in the robotics domain fails to facilitate any significant level of software reuse or portability. This paper identifies the major issues limiting software reuse in the robotics domain. Lack of standardisation, diversity of robotic platforms, and the subtle effects of environmental interaction all contribute to this problem. It is then shown that software components, fuzzy logic, and related techniques can be used together to provide suitable abstractions to address this problem. While complete software reuse is not possible, it is demonstrated that significant levels of software reuse can be obtained. Without an acceptable level of reuse or portability, softwa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ASWEC
• Authors: Glenn Smith, Robert Smith, Aster Wardhani
• Keywords: ASWEC 2005, Robotic Platforms, Software Engineering, Software Reuse