Design Abstraction and Processes in Robotics: From Code-Driven to Model-Driven Engineering

Advanced software engineering is the key factor in the design of future complex cognitive robots. It will decide about their robustness, (run-time) adaptivity, cost-effectiveness and usability. We present a novel overall vision of a model-driven engineering approach for robotics that fuses strategies for robustness by design and robustness by adaptation. It enables rigid definitions of quality-of-service, re-configurability and physics-based simulation as well as for seamless system level integration of disparate technologies and resource awareness. We report on steps towards implementing this idea driven by a first robotics meta-model with first explications of non-functional properties. A model-driven toolchain provides the model transformation and code generation steps. It also provides design time analysis of resource parameters (e.g. schedulability analysis of realtime tasks) as step towards resource awareness in the development of integrated robotic systems.