Effective engineering of multi-robot software applications

Paper in proceeding, 2018

The number and complexity of robotic applications that are being developed both in industry and academia are increasing continuously. However, those applications are not engineered through well-defined system engineering processes, and this leads to time-consuming issues. Besides, robot applications are increasingly based on teams of autonomous robots that work collaboratively with other robots and/or humans to accomplish complex missions. This further increases the complexity of the controlling application. In this Ph.D. project, we aim to bring software engineering best practices to the robotic domain in order to produce processes, architectural models, and methods to be used by developers in order to tackle common challenges such as reusability, variability, and modularity. The goal is to reduce development time and effort, thereby reducing the time-to-market of robotic applications. To validate our results we make use of different models of real robots in real-world scenarios.