BRICS - Best Practice in Robotics

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Model driven engineering and tool chain

This activity will focus on:

• creating the Model-Driven Engineering models for robust autonomy in robotic systems
• the integration of the BRICS best practices results in these domains into the Eclipse tool chain
• and the integration of existing legacy Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools into a BRICS Integrated Development Environment.

The following scientific and technical key issues will be addressed:

• The BRICS Integrated Development Environment
  It is planned to create a BRICS Integrated Development Environment, which will be based on Eclipse, remain fully compatible with the ongoing evolutions within the broader Eclipse ecosystem, but that will provide the robotics community with an Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) tool chain that contains the robotics domain specific models and tools to build the BRICS Robotics RTD Platforms, components and interfaces. This challenge contains scientific as well as technical issues and challenges.
• The Model-Driven Engineering MDE models of robotics
  At the scientific level, the main challenge is the identification of what MDE models are appropriate abstractions of the complex, autonomous and robust multi-agent systems that are so typical for intelligent robot systems, and that are not well supported by the ongoing activities in the other mentioned domains (automotive, aerospace, aviation, mobile telephony) because these domains focus much more on 100% verifiable and predictable systems. Technically speaking, the major challenges are to find appropriate granularities for the MDE models, and to package and document them in a way that makes them attractive for reuse and for co-development by all stakeholders in the robotics domain, and not just the BRICS partners.
• Integration of legacy tools
  Being able to integrate already existing models from popular CAE tools (such as Simulink, 20Sim, etc.) will be a key factor for acceptance in the robotics community. These tools only provide small parts of the computer support that robot system developers want, but they can provide a lot of added value in their own niches; for example, Simulink is being used by many robotics labs and companies to design control algorithms. So, it would be a mistake not to allow developers to keep on using these tools.

Results:

• M. Klotzbuecher, H. Bruyninckx. Statecharts and IPC policy improvements to MDE standards. BRICS Deliverable D4.2, June 2011.
• H. Garcia, H. Bruyninckx. Tool chain (BRIDE) delivered as BRICS software distribution. BRICS Deliverable D4.4, April 2011.
• A. Shakhimardanov, N. Hochgeschwender, M, Reckhaus and G. K. Kraetzschmar. Analysis of software connectors in robotics. In Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '11), September 2011, San Francisco, CA, USA.
• M. Klotzbücher, P. Soetens and H. Bruyninckx. OROCOS RTT-Lua: an Execution Environment for building Real-time Robotic Domain Specific Languages. In Proc. of the Internation Workshop on Dynamic Languages (DYROS '10), November 2010, Darmstadt, Germany.
• G. K. Kraetzschmar, A. Shakhimardanov, J. Paulus, N. Hochgeschwender, M. Reckhaus. Specifications of Architectures, Modules, Modularity, and Interfaces for the BROCRE Software Platform and Robot Control Architecture Workbench. BRICS Deliverable D2.2, August 2010.
• R. Bischoff, T. Guhl, E. Prassler, W. Nowak, G. Kraetzschmar, H. Bruyninckx, P. Soetens, M. Haegele, A. Pott, P. Breedveld, J. Broenink, D. Brugali and N. Tomatis. BRICS − Best practice in robotics. In Proc. of the IFR International Symposium on Robotics (ISR 2010), June 2010, Munich, Germany.
• First established CAE tool integration: BRICS Deliverable D4.1 with Appendix BCM: A Minimal Robotic Component Model for Multitarget System and Component Generation available.