A Robotic Wheelchair Component-Based Software Development
Dayang N. A. Jawawi, Suzila Sabil, Rosbi Mamat, Mohd Zulkifli Mohd Zaki, Mahmood Aghajani Siroos Talab, Radziah Mohamad, Norazian M., Khadijah Kamal · InTech eBooks · 2011
Mobile Robots -Control Architectures, Bio-Interfacing, Navigation, Multi Robot Motion Planning and Operator Training 102 support different multi-constraint extra-functionality requirement.On the contrary, Koala supports resource constraint and PECOS supports timing problems.KobrA does not support ERT system development, but it has an extension that calls MARMOT (Bunse & Gross, 2006) to support multi-disciplinary knowledge in ERT system development.The only limitation of MARMOT is minimum support for multi-constraint extra-functionality requirement.Therefore, PECOS is suitable to support multi-constraint in extra-functionality requirements whereby, MARMOT is good to support multi-disciplinary knowledge.An integration of PECOS and MARMOT can be a promising strategy to support the two issues.Implying a methodological support to enable a systematic CBD can be an important approach with consideration of the two issues.Currently, there are many Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) methodology available, but for Component-Oriented Analysis and Design (COAD) method, the focus is still on PC based domain such as the web application (Lee and Shirani, 2004) and simulation systems (Gong et al., 2010).Component technologies also improved along with engineering practices, but they lack of a methodology that uses components within such a paradigm (Dogru & Tanik, 2003).Motivated by these challenges, the focus of this chapter is to propose a method for developing robotic wheelchair software using a set of reusable software components obtained from mobile robot software.The method was adapted from general ERT component technologies and was applied to a robotic wheelchair CBD.The method is a combination of MARMOT and PECOS technologies aiming to support CBD methodological with purpose to solve multi-constraint extra-functionality requirement and multidisciplinary knowledge that are required in the robotic wheelchair software development.The proposed systematic CBD process model is based on the Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) that is defined by Wang and Qian (2005).CBSE is a combination of Component-Oriented Analysis (COA), Component-Oriented Design (COD) and Component-Oriented Programming (COP) and Component-Oriented Management (COM).This chapter focuses on COA, COD and COP process of development, and this chapter defines the COA, COD and COP modelling and deployment activities of the method in a form of process model representation.The process model depicts understandable integration between MARMOT and PECOS.This chapter documented the applicability of the process model in a wheelchair software development and implementation.This implementation showed how the process model helped the wheelchair hardware and software engineer to identify the possible software reused component in the early stage of the system and software development.The amount of software component reused in the wheelchair CBD from a mobile robot system was discussed and compared with a reused case from a mobile robot to another mobile robot CBD.The objective of the comparison was to identify the differences between the software reuse to support technologies transfer from robotic technologies to rehabilitation engineering with software reuse within robotics systems.Software reuse in robotics domain is one of the focuses area in current robotic research, example of the study are by Nesnas et al. (2006), Jang et al (2010) and Mallet et al. (2007).The layout of this chapter is as follows: Section 2 discusses the robotic wheelchair design considerations and the hardware description.In section 3 the strategy to define the process model to support the CBD of the wheelchair software are described.The process model to support the CBD method is described in Section 4. Section 5 illustrates the process model in a CBD of the robotic wheelchair software.The comparison result to compare the process model with other models will be discussed in detail in Section 6.The Section 7 concludes the chapter.