An Initial Framework of Dynamic Software Product Line Engineering for Adaptive Service Robot

Abstract

Service robot has its challenge to adapt on new tasks based on instruction or environment. Such conditions need to reconfigure or reorganize to obtain new system capabilities. However, most common service robot, especially the one that gives services to help human to deliver food or non medical stuffs in an elderly house, suffers on its task flexibility. Unlike a human, robot system needs to be reconfigured to have a new task which may interrupt its services because of this event. To this, we need a technique to handle adaptive tasks that is flexible to change the robot tasks that do not create delay. Dynamic software product line provides a mechanism to reconfigure a system to have different capabilities based on the core assets of the system, such as software that supports and controls the hardware components in a robotic system. In this work, we make use of the dynamic software product line to create a flexible method that enables a service robot to adapt on its new tasks. In order to define the change of tasks, we model the transformation of task using a transition state which has constraints as a trigger. Other than that, the request of change may also have resulted by forcing an interrupt mechanism. To demonstrate the capability of our approach, the proof of concept using Robotic Operating System will be presented.