Automating Cataloging and Discovery of Services for Service-Oriented Robotic Systems

Recently, a range of different types of robots has been developed for several sectors of the society. To cope with this demand and increasing complexity, diverse ways have been investigated to support the development of robotic systems, i.e., The software systems that control robots. In particular, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising solution to organize elements that compose robotic systems and can be used to overcome inherent problems of development in robotics, such as integration of heterogeneous hardware devices and reuse of complex software modules. In this scenario, companies and research institutes have released tools and environments specially focused on the development of robotic systems based on SOA. However, none of these environments provide a mechanism that makes it possible to efficiently catalog and discover the various services available for composing such systems, thus reducing the potential of reuse provided by SOA. This paper presents Robo SeT, a mechanism that supports cataloging and discovery of services for the development of robotic systems. It is based on semantic search and uses a taxonomy of the robotics domain to classify services. Results of our case study indicate that Robo SeT facilitates the development of robotic systems, since it presents the potential to widely promote reusability of robotics services.