Modeling robot and world interfaces for reusable tasks

Robotics applications involve robots that perform tasks by interacting with specific worlds. Most applications are intertwined with and tied to fixed robots and worlds. Changes and evolution of a robot or world have an invasive and often unpredictable impact on the application software. We propose making the models of robots and worlds explicit in robotics applications and separate these by introducing application-specific and platform-independent interfaces. This separation allows modular model-driven development of robotics applications and enables the reuse and adaptation of models and applications without need for invasive modifications. We present a framework with a family of modeling languages for conceptual, platform-independent applications, tasks, robots, and worlds. The model-driven RoboTask framework integrates these languages with a runtime architecture to execute robotics tasks using a planner and mappings from conceptual models to actual platforms. This enables a separation of domain concerns from software development concerns and modification of applications without invasive impacts on their separated constituents. We believe that the enabled reuse and adaptation lead to more efficient development and higher quality software for robotics applications.