Agile Robot Development (aRD): A Pragmatic Approach to Robotic Software

Kurzfassung

Mechatronic systems are reaching a new level of complexity, both for the single component and for overall systems making necessary a new software concept for the development and usage of such systems. Here we introduce the agile Robot Development (aRD) concept, which is a flexible, pragmatic and distributed software design to support and simplify the development of complex mechatronic and robotic systems. It gives easy access to scalable computing performance (even in hard real-time) and is motivated by the abstract view on a robotic system as being a decentral net of calculation blocks and communication links. We discuss design considerations and an implementation of this concept and demonstrate its performance with first applications.