Software development for service robots: A model-driven and component oriented approach

This Thesis continues the research line in the development of teleoperated robotic systems initiated by the DSIE research group of the Technical University of Cartagena ten years ago and starts from the results of a previous Thesis, in which a reference architecture for teleoperated robotic systems, called ACRoSeT, was designed. ACRoSeT proposes a series of platform independent components for designing the software control architecture of a robot. This independence allows not only the reuse of these components among different applications but also the translation to different programming languages or using different robotic frameworks. But ACRoSeT does not offer any guide regarding the software implementation of the concepts it defines.;The present Thesis completes the design of ACRoSeT using the newly Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm to (1) propose a solution to the semantic and implementation ambiguity of some of the concepts defined by ACRoSeT; (2) raise the level of abstraction used by the developer to design the software architecture of a robot using the concepts defined by ACRoSeT; (3) change the error-prone process of manual translation from the abstract ACRoSeT components to executable code by a (semi-) automatic process that erases this source of errors from the final implementation; and (4) allow different implementations in different programming languages and even robotic frameworks.;To achieve these objectives, this Thesis proposes (1) a component meta-model, called V3Studio, that contains all the concepts of the robotics domain defined by ACRoSeT; (2) a model to model transformation between V 3Studio and UML that reduces the semantic distance between the component model and the final code implementation, and that also eases the development of different transformations to different implementation languages; and (3) a model to text transformation to translate the UML model to the Ada 2005 programming language. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach, this Thesis includes the development of the control system of a XYZ cartesian robot, designed in the context of the VI European Growth Programm EFTCoR .