Service Robot Control Architectures for Flexible and Robust Real-World Task Execution: Best Practices and Patterns

Successfully building complex service robotic systems that robustly operate in real-world environments gives a lot of insights into what are valuable patterns in architecting such systems. In this paper, we describe some of our insights with respect to robot control architectures and robotics software systems engineering. The focus of the paper is not on discussing specific functionalities but to explain some best practices that evolved out of our experience in building complex software intensive robotic systems. These behind-the-scenes insights are in particular relevant in moving forward towards a robotics business ecosystem with separation of roles and based on model-driven approaches for handling systems of systems.