Re-engineering Software Architecture ofHomeService Robots: ACaseStudy
Moonzoo Kim, Jaejoon Lee, Young-Jin Hong · 2005
Withtheadvances ofrobotics, computer science, andother related areas, homeservice robots attract muchattention frombothacademia andindustry. Homeservice robots present interesting technical challenges tothecommunity in thattheyhaveawiderangeofpotential applications, such ashomesecurity, patient caring, cleaning, etc., andthatthe services provided bytherobots ineachapplication areaare beingdefined asmarkets areformed and,therefore, they change constantly. Without architectural considerations toaddress these challenges, robot manufacturers often focus ondeveloping technical components (e.g., vision recognizer, speech processor, andactuator) andthenattempt todevelop service robots byintegrating these components. Whenprototypes aredeveloped foranewapplication, orwhenservices areadded, modified, orremoved fromexisting robots, unexpected, undesirable, andoften dangerous side-effects, whichareknown asfeature interaction problem, happen frequently. Reengineering ofsuchrobots canmakeaserious impact indelivery timeanddevelopment cost. Inthis paper, wepresent ourexperience ofre-engineering aprototype ofahomeservice robot developed bySamsung Advanced Institute ofTechnology. First, wedesigned amodularandhierarchical software architecture thatmakesinteraction amongthecomponents visible. Withthevisibility of interactions, wecouldassign functional responsibilities to eachcomponent clearly. Then,were-engineered existing codes toconform tothenewarchitecture using areactive language Esterel. Asaresult, wecoulddetect andsolve feature interaction problems andalleviate thedifficulty of adding orupdating components.