A Requirements Modeling Language for the Component Behavior of Cyber Physical Robotics Systems
This work addresses software development challenges for cyber-physical robotics systems, offering a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The authors tackled the complexity of robotics software development by proposing a requirements modeling language using I/O! automata to specify component behavior, enabling early simulation, formal analysis, and code generation, as demonstrated in a case study with the Lego NXT platform.
Software development for robotics applications is a sophisticated endeavor as robots are inherently complex. Explicit modeling of the architecture and behavior of robotics application yields many advantages to cope with this complexity by identifying and separating logically and physically independent components and by hierarchically structuring the system under development. On top of component and connector models we propose modeling the requirements on the behavior of robotics software components using I/O! automata. This approach facilitates early simulation of requirements model, allows to subject these to formal analysis and to generate the software from them. In this paper, we introduce an extension of the architecture description language MontiArc to model the requirements on components with I/O!automata, which are defined in the spirit of Martin Glinz Statecharts for requirements modeling [10]. We furthermore present a case study based on a robotics application generated for the Lego NXT robotic platform.