Separation of Concerns Within Robotic Systems Through Proactive Computing

In this short paper, we first introduce a possible new model for designing and implementing software in robotic systems. This model is based on proactive scenarios, coded through dynamic sets of condition-action rules. Each scenario embeds the required rules and can be assembled dynamically with others, allowing the proactive system to achieve a unique objective or behavior and instruct the robot accordingly. Furthermore, a scenario is not aware of the existence of the other scenarios. In fact, it only contains information about a predefined central scenario, which oversees global decision making. In addition, each scenario knows where to enter its suggestions, thus allowing for a high degree in terms of separating concerns and modularity of code. Consequently, allowing easier development, testing and optimization of each scenario independently, possible reuse in different robots, and finally, a faster achievement of robust and scalable robotics software. We then show how to apply this programming model and its functionalities during runtime, by a proof of concept consisting of a virtual robot deployed in
the Webots™ simulator. This simulator is controlled with four proactive scenarios (plus the central one), in charge of three different objectives.