A Software Product Line Approach for Configuring Cloud Robotics Applications

The computational requirements of the increasingly sophisticated algorithms used in today's robotics software applications have outpaced the onboard processors of the average robot. Furthermore, the development and configuration of these applications are difficult tasks that require expertise in diverse domains, including software engineering, control engineering, and computer vision. As a solution to these problems, this paper extends and integrates our previous works, which are based on two promising techniques: Cloud Robotics and Software Product Lines. Cloud Robotics provides a powerful and scalable environment to offload the computationally expensive algorithms resulting in low-cost processors and light-weight robots. Software Product Lines allow the end user to deploy and configure complex robotics applications without dealing with low-level problems such as configuring algorithms and designing architectures. This paper discusses the proposed method in depth, and demonstrates its advantages with a case study.