Software Architectures for Mobile Robots

Software architecture, in general, both refers to the high-level structure of a system as well as to the process of ensuring that the structure or the design of a system is according to specific needs. For mobile robotics, specific requirements are, for example, real-time capabilities, asynchronous data processing, and distributed functionality. While there is a clear distinction between a design of a software architecture suitable for robotics and the particular reference design implementation, in practice, due to the complexity of the task, frameworks for robotics often come with a single reference implementation. Therefore, when comparing and choosing an appropriate software architecture, it is prudent to take into consideration not only the design but the suitability of the implementation as well. This chapter appears in: Ang, M.H., Khatib, O., Siciliano, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Robotics. For a researcher the design and implementation of such system is usually a "necessary evil", as it is required in order to deploy subsequently developed research code. Only with respect to data logging, a plethora of different formats for storing sensory data have been proposed and used by the community, each necessitating its own set of data parsing tools and interfaces to convert to alternative formats. Optimal design of architectures suitable to the needs of a mobile robot system is a research topic on its own right, but the vast majority of researchers in the field are typically users of the middleware system, instead of active developers. The core idea is to separate the application into reusable components.