Managing extensibility and maintainability of industrial robotics software

As neither the set of robotics devices nor the operations they can execute is fixed, a software framework for robotics should be extensible. Moreover, as the environment the robots work in changes, the application controlling them must be easily adaptable to changing requirements. When this can be achieved at run-time, it leads to a continuous evolution of robotics software. This paper presents an object-oriented software framework, the Java-based Robotics API, that facilitates extensibility with code reuse. By integrating the framework into the dynamic module system OSGi, it is possible to continuously evolve a robotics application (including its real-time capable parts).