Agent-oriented software patterns for rapid and affordable robot programming

Robotic systems are often quite complex to develop: they are huge, heavily constrained from the nonfunctional point of view and they implement challenging algorithms. The lack of integrated methods with reuse approaches leads robotic developers to reinvent the wheel each time a new project starts. This paper proposes to reuse the experience done when building robotic applications, by catching it into design patterns. These represent a general mean for (i) reusing proved solutions increasing the final quality, (ii) communicating the knowledge about a domain and (iii) reducing the development time and effort. Despite of this generality, the proposed repository of patterns is specific for multi-agent robotic systems. These patterns are documented by a set of design diagrams and the corresponding implementing code is obtained through a series of automatic transformations. Some patterns extracted from an existing and freely available repository are presented. The paper also discusses an experimental set-up based on the construction of a complete robotic application obtained by composing some highly reusable patterns. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.