Modeling and reusing robotic software architectures: The HyperFlex toolchain

During the last years robotic researchers have been able of developing extremely complex applications. The complexity of these applications is reflected by the variety of functionalities involved, which are provided by a significant number of components. Although the reuse of software components is becoming a best-practice, the reuse of reference architectures, which model sub-systems providing functionalities common to a great number of applications, is still uncommon. This paper provides two contributions to this topic: (a) a development process that defines how reference architectures can be exploited for building robotic applications, (b) the HyperFlex software toolchain, which has been developed for supporting the design and the reuse of reference architectures. The idea presented in this paper is simple yet powerful: instead of building complex applications by reusing single components, even more complex applications can be developed by reusing reference architectures of mature sub-systems.