A Reuse-Oriented Development Process for Component-based Robotic Systems

State of the art in robot software development mostly relies on class library reuse and only to a limited extent to component-based design. In the BRICS project we have defined a software development process that is based on the two most recent and promising approaches to software reuse, i.e. Software Product Line (SPL) and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). The aim of this paper is to illustrate the whole software development process that we have defined for developing flexible and reusable component-based robotics libraries, to exemplify it with the case study of robust navigation functionality, and to present the software tools that we have developed for supporting the proposed process.