Model-Driven Development of Intelligent Mobile Robot Using Systems Modeling Language (SysML)

In Japan alone the number of disabled and elderly people are growing rapidly and they usually require personal transportation vehicles such as cars and wheelchairs. However, people currently have limited capabilities or difficulties to operate these vehicles in such complex environments like shopping malls or tourist-attraction centers. In recent years, a great number of studies of mobile robot applications have been proposed. However, only few of these studies have realized the model-based design approach in their entire development process. NEDO’s Intelligent Robot Technology (RT) Software project (Okano et al.,2009) started to promote the robot technology as the basic knowledge and technology to solve various problems in daily life. In this context, an intelligent mobile robot has been developed for providing mobility to the elderly and physically unfortunate people. Besides that, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and technology, also known as AIST has developed the RT-Middleware (RTM) in order to achieve efficiency in developing robot software components (Ando et al., 2005). The main idea of this research is to develop robot software modules by looking from the system engineering analysis point of views. This is because most robotic systems are complex embedded systems. System engineering approaches focus on designing and constructing the complete system, and also on providing model reuse capabilities. Moreover, these approaches can enhance communications among the development teams, specification and design qualities and reuse of system specification and design artifacts. Modules’ reusability is our main concern in this paper. Past development efforts of robot software using Model Driven Architecture (OMG MDA, 2003) Model Driven Architecture® (OMG MDA, 2003) approach seem insufficient to support the demand of current industrial-to-domestic robot transitions. Developing intelligent robots in large scales is very demanding for experiment purposes. Thus, almost all robot systems have some common functions. However, much usable design information went to waste because of a serious lack of sharing and reusability. This motivates us to explore the