Agent-oriented software patterns for rapid and affordable robot programming

Abstract

Robotic systems are often quite complex to develop; they are huge, heavily constrained from the non-functional point of view and they implement challenging algorithms. The lack of integrated methods with reuse approaches leads robotic developers to reinvent the wheel each time a new project starts. This paper proposes to reuse the experience done when building robotic applications, by catching it into design patterns. These represent a general mean for (i) reusing proved solutions increasing the final quality, (ii) communicating the knowledge about a domain and (iii) reducing the development time and effort. Despite of this generality, the proposed repository of patterns is specific for multi-agent robotic systems. These patterns are documented by a set of design diagrams and the corresponding implementing code is obtained through a series of automatic transformations. Some patterns extracted from an existing and freely available repository are presented. The paper also discusses an experimental set-up based on the construction of a complete robotic application obtained by composing some highly reusable patterns.