A Comparison of Two Software Architectures for General Purpose Mobile Service Robots

This paper exposes a set of tools which can be used to quantitatively evaluate the required effort to update the software system that operates a general purpose service mobile robot. These tools are used to compare a Blackboard-based and a Peer-to-Peer architectures in the context of mobile robotics. The analysis consider the development cost for an update, as well as the response time for both architectures. The results show that it is regularly simpler to maintain a robotics software system with Blackboard architecture than when a Peer-to-Peer architecture is used. Also results show that there is no noticeable change in the response time or performance of the robot when using any architecture.