Workshop Theme

The growing number of robot systems and applications raises the problem of reusability. There is a significant portion of robot functionality that is common to a large number of robotic systems in different application domains. Unfortunately, most functionality implementations are tied to specific robot hardware, processing platforms, and communication environments. Today, most research and development in software for robotic systems is based on proprietarily designed architectures invented from scratch each time. Many valuable robotic applications are monolithic systems that have been developed to solve a specific class of problem, and are often not reusable, even in only slightly different scenarios.

There is an increased awareness within the Robotics community for the importance of developing robotic software principles for large and complex robotics systems. The previous edition (SDIR2005) of this workshop at ICRA2005 focused on “crafting modular and interoperable systems” and gathered more than 30 participants and 15 invited speakers, who discussed current approaches, technologies, and software tools for the development of software for robotic systems. Two editorial projects followed from the fruitful discussion among the participants: the special issue of the International Journal on Advanced Robotic Systems on “Software Development and Integration in Robotics” and the Springer book “Software Engineering for Experimental Robotics” in the STAR Series.

As an emerging research field, robot software development is generating a growing body of scientific literature and industrial developments. Nevertheless, the field is still characterized by the lack of a sound and comprehensive body of concepts that has been widely adopted. As a consequence, it is rather difficult to understand, assess, and compare the existing approaches. In turn, this limits our ability to fully exploit them in practice, and to further promote the research work on robot software development.

This new edition of the workshop (SDIR2007) will be more focused on analyzing concepts to understand and compare robot software systems and on identifying criteria and guidelines that support the developer in the design of robot software architectures.

The tangible results of the workshop will be a roadmap that indicates the strategic research directions to pursue the synergy between Robotics and Software Engineering.