Workshop Theme

The proposed workshop reflects an increased awareness within the Robotics community for the importance of developing robotic software principles for large and complex robotics systems. 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 SDIR workshop will focus on a peculiar aspect of robot software development, that is design of realtime robot behaviour. Usually, robot software design builds on high level abstractions such as concurrent execution, instantaneous computation, zero delay, and perfect communication between components and/or between components and the external environment. Real-time behaviour is then achieved by experimentation and measurement on specific platforms in order to adjust design parameters. This is a typical scenario that limits the reusability of valuable robotic systems. The objective of this workshop is to identify real-time software requirements for robotic applications, to compare existing approaches, software environments and tools, and to discuss why current practice does not address the problem of designing reusable robot software in a satisfactory way.

The expected result is a practical program of research and public relations focused on the way that software development techniques are actually practiced in Robotics and a roadmap that indicates the strategic directions to pursue the synergy between Robotics and Software Engineering.