Industry Best Practices in Robotics Software Engineering

Robots are increasingly entering our lives: cleaning robots are in our homes, (partly) automated vehicles bring us to work where we cooperate with service robots, industrial robots, or agricultural robots. Successfully engineering robots demands the interdisciplinary collaboration of experts from, e.g., electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. Consequently, integrating modules contributed by respective experts is a key challenge in engineering software-centric robots, yet it is only one of the cross-cutting software concerns crucial to robotics. Hence, most of the added value contributed by domain experts, as well as the glue between the individual experts' contributions in modern robots, is software.