SARAMR : uma arquitetura de referência baseada em loops de controle para facilitar manutenções em software robótico autoadaptativo
Resumen
Autonomous mobile robots are a special category of robots designed for
performing tasks without the intervention of human beings. Some robots are
designed to perform tasks in completely inhospitable environments such as the
earth´s subsurface, the ocean depths or spatial exploration. In order to consider a
robot as autonomous, a fundamental premise is to have self-adaptation
capabilities. Over the last years, the advances in technology allow the
development of self-adaptive systems, which are able to manage themselves to
recuperate from faults or even change their behavior and structure in order to
improve the quality of the delivered service. A critical point when building any
software is its architecture, i.e., its structural organization in a set of interacting
components. In this context, reference architecture is a technique that is well
known for combining the best practices, patterns and strategies for building and
standardizing domain specific software. Nowadays, there is a lack of studies
presenting reference architectures for structuring self-adaptive software of mobile
robots in order to decrease maintenance efforts. A number of studies claim that
self-adaptive systems are based on the control theory and, more specifically, on
the use of control loops in their architecture to perform adaptations. Therefore,
this master thesis proposes SARAMR, a control loop-based reference architecture
whose goal is to make maintenance activities a more productive task. The
employment of the architecture divides the whole system in two modules; base
application and adaptation module. The adaptation module encompasses the
control loops and the base application is further divided into three other
components: environment, behaviors and the electromechanical part. SARAMR
was qualitatively evaluated by means of the development of two applications: a
self-adaptive wall follower mobile robot and another conventional one to
performing monitoring in in-door environments. Next, some maintenance
activities were created to investigate the effort of applying them. We have
observed that the separation of concerns of our architecture allows new
components to be added causing less impacts than in systems developed in an adhoc
way.