Architectural Tactics for Energy-Aware Robotics Software: A Preliminary Study

Paper in proceeding, 2021

In software engineering, energy awareness refers to the conscious design and development of software that is able to monitor and react to energy state. Energy awareness is the key building block for energy efficiency and for other quality aspects of robotics software, such as mission completion time and safety. However, as of today, there is no guidance for practitioners and researchers on how to architect robotics software with energy awareness in mind. The goal of this paper is to identify architectural tactics for energy-aware robotics software. Specifically, using a dataset of 339493 data points extracted from five complementary data sources (e.g., source code repositories, Stack Overflow), we identified and analyzed 97 data points that considered both energy consumption and architectural concerns. We then synthesized a set of energy-aware architectural tactics via thematic analysis. In this preliminary investigation we focus on two representative architectural tactics.