MontiArcAutomaton: Modeling Architecture and Behavior of Robotic Systems
This addresses the problem of inefficient and non-reusable software development for robotic systems, making it incremental by extending existing concepts to bridge platform gaps.
The paper tackles the challenge of platform-dependent development in robotics, which impedes reusability and portability, by introducing MontiArcAutomaton, a modeling framework that provides an integrated, platform-independent language and extensible code generation to facilitate reuse and improve development efficiency.
Robotics poses a challenge for software engineering as the vast numbers of different robot platforms impose different requirements on robot control architectures. The platform dependent development of robotic applications impedes reusability and portability. The lack of reusability hampers broad propagation of robotics applications. The MontiArcAutomaton architecture and behavior modeling framework provides an integrated, platform independent structure and behavior modeling language with an extensible code generation framework. MontiArcAutomaton's central concept is encapsulation and decomposition known from Component & Connector Architecture Description Languages. This concept is extended from the modeling language to the code generation and target runtime framework to bridge the gap of platform specific and independent implementations along well designed interfaces. This facilitates the reuse of robot applications and makes their development more efficient.