Software stability in the robotics domain: issues and challenges

A robot is a physical device that interacts with the external world through sensors and actuators, and carries out tasks autonomously in unstructured, dynamic, partially observable, and uncertain environments. Software applications are the medium to embody intelligence in the robot. Today, most of the research and development of software for robotic systems is based on proprietary design architectures invented from scratch each time. As robots have started to become commodities, a more stability-oriented software development approach is needed. This paper formulates the problem of developing stable software systems in the robotics domain, analyses issues that make the problem hard, and identifies challenges the robotics community has to face in order to build stable software systems.