Software Architectures for Mobile Robots

TL;DR

This paper reviews the importance of software architectures in mobile robots, discussing requirements, existing design solutions, historical frameworks, and future directions for development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of software architecture requirements and design solutions specific to mobile robot systems, highlighting past frameworks and future research directions.

Findings

Analysis of various mobile robot software architectures

Historical perspective on framework evolution

Identification of future development directions

Abstract

A software architecture defines the blueprints of a large computational system, and is thus a crucial part of the design and development effort. This task has been explored extensively in the context of mobile robots, resulting in a plethora of reference designs and implementations. As the software architecture defines the framework in which all components are implemented, it is naturally a very important aspect of a mobile robot system. In this chapter, we overview the requirements that the particular problem domain (a mobile robot system) imposes on the software framework. We discuss some of the current design solutions, provide a historical perspective on common frameworks, and outline directions for future development.