A dependable open platform for industrial robotics -: A case study

Industrial robots are complex systems with strict real time, reliability, availability, and safety requirements. Robot controllers are the basic components of the product-line architecture of these systems. They are complex real time computers which control the mechanical arms of a robot. By their nature, robot controllers are generic and open computer systems, because to be useful, they must be programmable by end-users. This is typically done by using software configuration parameters and a domain and vendor-specific programming language. For some purposes, this may not be sufficient. A means of adding low-level software extensions to the robot controller, basically extending its base software platform is needed when, for example, a third party wants to add a completely new sensor type that is not supported by the platform. Any software platform evolution in this direction introduces a new set of broad quality issues and other concerns. Dependability concerns, especially safety, reliability and availability, are among the most important for robot systems. In this paper, we use the ABB robot controller to show how an architecture transformation approach based on quality attributes can be used in the design process for increasing the platf openness.