Policy-based self-adaptive architectures: a feasibility study in the robotics domain

Abstract

Robotics is a challenging domain which sometimes exhibits a clear need for self-adaptive capabilities, as such functionality offers the potential for robots to account for their unstable and unpredictable deployment domains. This paper focuses on a feasibility study in applying a policy- and architecture-based approach to the development of self-adaptive robotic systems. We describe two case studies in which we construct self-adaptive Robocode and Mindstorms robots, report on our development experiences, and discuss the challenges we encountered. The paper establishes that it is feasible to apply our approach to the robotics domain, contributes a discussion of the architectural issues we encountered, and further evaluates our general-purpose approach.