Supporting Robotic Software Migration Using Static Analysis and Model-Driven Engineering
This addresses the issue of technology stagnation for robotic engineers by automating software migration, though it is incremental as it builds on existing static analysis and model-driven engineering techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of migrating robotic software between hardware platforms by introducing RoboSMi, a model-driven approach that uses static analysis and code generation, resulting in successful migration of two robotic systems with reduced manual effort.
The wide use of robotic systems contributed to developing robotic software highly coupled to the hardware platform running the robotic system. Due to increased maintenance cost or changing business priorities, the robotic hardware is infrequently upgraded, thus increasing the risk for technology stagnation. Reducing this risk entails migrating the system and its software to a new hardware platform. Conventional software engineering practices such as complete re-development and code-based migration, albeit useful in mitigating these obsolescence issues, they are time-consuming and overly expensive. Our RoboSMi model-driven approach supports the migration of the software controlling a robotic system between hardware platforms. First, RoboSMi executes static analysis on the robotic software of the source hardware platform to identify platform-dependent and platform-agnostic software constructs. By analysing a model that expresses the architecture of robotic components on the target platform, RoboSMi establishes the hardware configuration of those components and suggests software libraries for each component whose execution will enable the robotic software to control the components. Finally, RoboSMi through code-generation produces software for the target platform and indicates areas that require manual intervention by robotic engineers to complete the migration. We evaluate the applicability of RoboSMi and analyse the level of automation and performance provided from its use by migrating two robotic systems deployed for an environmental monitoring and a line following mission from a Propeller Activity Board to an Arduino Uno.