IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2015 - 32

should support design and code reusability, simplify the
design process, automate the design and generation process as
much as possible, and eventually support verification and validation of the developed final product.
A robotic system is a synergy between many fields of
study, including mechanics, physics, chemistry, electronics, software, and control theory. Typically, during the
development process, these diverse aspects of system
development are handled by different groups that require
different expertise. Historically, control engineers, embedded software developers, mechanical engineers, system
integrators, and so on worked separately. However, rapid
prototyping of robotic systems demands closer collaboration between these groups and requires processes that
support closer collaboration. At the same time, tighter
interaction between different aspects of the system
requires a focus on the interfaces between them. Control
designers should be more aware of the capabilities of the
embedded platform,
while the designers of
embedded networking
Designing a robotic
should take chosen cont rol st r ate g i e s i nto
system requires
account when planning
communications within
translating the
the system. This makes
the integration of the
definition of the desired
system more challenging
since a change in one
electromechanical device
aspect of the system renders other aspects
between various types
inconsistent. Furthermore, it is necessary to
of specifications.
incorporate architectural modeling of the
system as part of the design process to ensure that each
system component/functionality remains consistent with
any architectural or system changes.
The importance of the architectural system modeling has
led to the development of the architecture analysis and
design language (AADL) [35] for the modeling of hardware
and software architectures in embedded systems. AADL
includes software, hardware, and system component abstractions to specify and analyze the real-time embedded systems,
complex systems of systems, and specialized performance
capability systems, and it maps software onto computational
hardware elements. Within the AADL, a component is characterized by an identity name, possible interfaces with other
components, properties, and subcomponents, and their
interactions.
Generation of Software Components
Following the AADL framework, which is general enough
to model a wide range of cyberphysical systems, and taking
advantage of the robot operating system (ROS) [36], [37]-
an open-source metaoperating system that provides a mes32

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2015

sage-passing structure between different processes (or
nodes) across a network (interprocess communication)-
researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a modular programming environment for robotic
applications called ROSLab (http://precise.github.io/
ROSLab/) [11].
ROSLab enables users to model the architecture of an
application that consists of a set of computational nodes and
communication channels between them. The interfaces of
some commonly used nodes, such as sensor and actuator
nodes, are predefined in ROSLab. Users can define a new
node and its interface by selecting the channels to add to the
interface of the node and to automatically generate the skeleton code.
Codesign of Hardware Mechanical Components
Recent work [38] extended ROSLab to provide a design
environment for creating the mechanical components
of robots. This work incorporated a component library
of the predesigned parametrized robotic building
blocks into ROSLab. In this interface, desired blocks
can be dragged into a workspace and parameters can be
set by the user based on target specifications. Once a
robot has been designed, it can be compiled to generate
the manufacturing specifications. Figure 8 shows a

(a)

(b)
Figure 8. A Seg robot (a) designed within the ROSLab-mechanics
programming environment and (b) fabricated in a cut-and-fold
process [38].

http://precise.github.io/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2015