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

Abstract

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 realtime) 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