Abstract
A robotic wheelchair system provides mobility for handicapped and elderly people who are unable to operate classical wheelchair system. Software development for such system is challenged by requirement for multi-disciplines expert knowledge which includes embedded systems, real-time software issues, control theories and artificial intelligence aspects. Software reuse is an approach to provide a way to reuse expertise that can be used across domains in software engineering. Software reuse can be a mechanism to support the attempts to transfer technology from other engineering fields to rehabilitation engineering. For example, (Bonail et al., 2009) and (Cheein et al., 2009) have attempted to transfer software platform and algorithms from robotic technologies to rehabilitation engineering software development. The technologies transfer requires a methodological support to enable a systematic software reuse of the multi-disciplines expert knowledge. Software reuse is one of the promising approaches to increase software productivity and improve its quality, as well as to decrease the costs of software development. This is because of software reuse uses existing software either in the form of component or knowledge to construct new software. Yet, applying software reuse in Embedded Real-Time (ERT) domain, such as robotic wheelchair sets major challenges to the software development process due to the resource-constrained and real-time requirements of the system. In order to overcome multi-constraints and multi-disciplinary knowledge in ERT software development problems, Component-Based Development (CBD) method becomes a promising approach for ERT software development (Bunse & Gross, 2006; Carlson et al., 2006). Existing industrial component technologies such as OMG’s CORBA Component Model (CCM), Microsoft’s (D) COM/COM++, .NET, SUN Microsystems’ JavaBeans and enterprise JavaBeans, are not suitable to develop ERT systems because they do not address the non-functional properties in ERT systems. With the purpose to meet the requirements of ERT systems, a number of component technologies such as Koala (Ommering, 2000), PECOS (Nierstrasz, et al., 2002) and KobrA (Atkinson, et al., 2002) have emerged. However, these component technologies still have some weaknesses. Koala and PECOS cannot support multi-disciplinary knowledge, but they can
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